Sarah gripes about people that pipe their blog posts into twitter or their tweets into their blog feeds. I couldn’t agree more. It’s incredibly annoying.
I don’t mind being notified via twitter of new blog posts, but I hate it when everything twittered shows up in the blog RSS feed. However, I understand that sometimes there’s stuff twittered worth being in the blog.
That’s why I’ve been using something I came up with that I’m calling “TweetRemote,” (soon to be available over at http://tweetremote.com), where I use hashtags to define the type of content I’m twittering. My scripts then can format the tweets (for example, posting “#image url cool!” in twitter would post the image to your blog along with your comments) and only post the ones meant for the blog as well. Not sure how well that makes sense, but hopefully it’ll be easier to see once I get the site up and whatnot. :)
I think it makes for a happy medium, anyway. Would you find that as annoying?
I don’t mind being notified via twitter of new blog posts, but I hate it when everything twittered shows up in the blog RSS feed. However, I understand that sometimes there’s stuff twittered worth being in the blog.
I’m curious — why is one way okay with you and not the other? If I subscribe to your twitter feed, it’s because I want your twitters. If I want your blog posts, I’ll subscribe to your blog feed. Give users a choice — don’t force yourself on them. It’s impolite.
I’m not totally sure I understand your TweetRemote concept, so it’s hard to tell if it would be as annoying or not. The bottom line for me is that users should have a choice. If I want your Tweets, I’ll subscribe to them. If I want your blog posts, I’ll subscribe to them. If I want your flickr photos, I’ll subscribe to them. I don’t need one feed notifying me of activity in the other — if I’d wanted that activity in the other, I would have already subscribed to the other. It just all feels like forcing yourself on others, which look desperate, pathetic, and lame to me, on top of being annoying.
I found out about this post via Sarah’s twitter, and am sad to say that I commit the sin mentioned in this post of aggregating twitter content on my blog. But then again, I aggregate EVERYTHING on my blog, and probably annoy people all over the world constantly.
Then again, if you just want my “blog posts”, you can subscribe to just my LiveJournal. There are options out there, so many in fact, that one is paralyzed and forced to twitter frustration, dodgeball checkin at a bar at 11am, and post a picture of yourself kicking a kitten to Flickr.
I also aggregate everything here on this site (blog posts, twitter tweets, flickr photos, ma.gnolia links, upcoming events, etc, etc.). I don’t think that is the sin. The sin is not giving people a way to subscribe to these thing individually if they want to. You and I both give people a way to subscribe or follow just one thing or the other.
I see both sides of this. Twitter can be used as a great promotional tool. When it is used as such, hopefully your audience will enjoy that. If not, they’ll just go away. The trouble being that when you have interesting things to say, they’ll get lost in the promotional shuffle. My rule of thumb is to just leave those people altogether — I’m harsh that way.
When you want your website to be the aggregation of what you are around the web it can be a little tougher, but it shouldn’t. If I visit your website, I should be able to see everything you’re doing, if you choose to show me. If I subscribe to your website, I probably want specific topics or types of posts/information. It’s easy enough to offer different flavours of feeds that can suit just about any need. I just don’t know why people choose to be lazy and not give the audience a choice.
It’s all about choice people. Choose to wait for the nuggets of posts amongst all the linking on Twitter or choose to make an appropriately combined feed for your website.
I actually subscribe to Buster’s “everything” feed, and though there are some duplicates of things I saw on Twitter or Flickr or Dodgeball already, there’s not so much that it’s annoying. If you start tweeting more, at least I have the option of subscribing to your individual streams, and that’s the key.
When people only offer one aggregated stream, either via RSS or by importing notifications into Twitter, they don’t give their readers a choice, except to stop following them completely. That’s an easy choice when it’s a random person I don’t know, but it’s much more difficult when the person in question is a friend or someone you really want to follow for personal reasons.
I’m curious — why is one way okay with you and not the other? If I subscribe to your twitter feed, it’s because I want your twitters. If I want your blog posts, I’ll subscribe to your blog feed. Give users a choice — don’t force yourself on them. It’s impolite.
Well, I see one of the biggest things Twitter is used for is notification. This is where I am, this is what I’m doing, and in this case, this is what I’m writing. There have been times where I may subscribe to somebody’s tweets, but not their blog, though I’ll still sometimes click through their tweets to check out what they were just writing. Sometimes after a few times I’ll even find myself subscribing to the blog.
As for TweetRemote, maybe this will help explain:
To me, the annoying thing about tweets showing up on a blog/in the feed is that they are often very unrelated to the topic of the blog or simply not blog-worthy content. Sometimes, however, a tweet is blog-worthy. Say, for example, it’s a cool link related to the subject of your blog. In that case, you’d post something like this, and it’d show up on the blog like this. Or for an image, you could tweet this and this would show up on the blog.
I don’t think people should take this to mean one should never post a link to a blog entry in their Twitter feed ever. One of the first things I said in my post was that Twitter is great for promoting something, and that you should feel free to do it occasionally.
My concern is with the automated services that do this for you every single time you post. Especially people who write blog entries frequently.
I would much rather see an occasional “Hey, I wrote something about [totally relevant topic] and I really want your feedback,” posted to someone’s Twitter, on occasion, when it’s relevant, than an automated “New blog post [link]” meaningless tweet that I’m just going to ignore because I’ll see what it’s about in my RSS reader later.
Elliot, I think what you’re doing there is very cool, in the sense that I appreciate the technology behind it and what you’ve done. However, I’m not sure that it’s very useful to your subscribers. It seems like, if I wanted to read your blog (i.e. subscribe to it in my RSS), and follow you on Twitter (like, say, get SMS notifications when you tweet), there would be no way to avoid duplicate content. That’s the part that gets annoying, for me. I’m annoyed if I get an SMS from someone saying “check out my blog post!” and then I get home to my RSS reader and I’ve got an unread item that it the exact same thing I got an SMS about earlier.
I get that you consider those tweet “blog-worthy,” and that’s totally cool. I’m not really concerned with what’s “blog-worthy” and what isn’t. What I’m interested in is not getting duplicate notifications (one through Twitter and one through RSS) every time one of my friends makes a blog entry or a tweet.
I think you, Elliot, could solve the issue by providing a feed of your blog posts that didn’t also include those tweets. If you did that, then I could subscribe to your blog, and follow you on twitter, and never get duplicate content. :)
Yeah, that’s totally understandable…I guess as long as they’re well-chosen and formatted nicely, it doesn’t really bother me. Though, I will be adding a tweet-free feed sometime soon for those who don’t like it.
I think this debate comes down to what I’ll call “editorial control”.
The problem I have with how some people use twitter is that they use it as a broadcast tool without any editorial control. Meaning they use fancy technology to update twitter automatically. This could be via RSS, Facebook, Brightkite, HypeMachine, etc. and it usually results in a pretty painful user experience for your followers.
Aggregation the other way; twitter to blog or feed is fine. Again, as long as you offer some ways for a follower to split that up.
(Oh shit. I just had an idea.)
What becomes painful, in both notification AND in the actual user experience is when you let services automatically update each other. I don’t mind the occasional blog link or song recommendation in my friend’s twttier feeds. But when that twitter feed becomes a replication of your Tumblr AND your blog’s RSSAND your lastfm playlist, etc. That’s when we’ve got a problem.
But, isn’t the answer to “what are you doing now” sometimes “posting my latest blog entry”? I don’t see why anyone could have a problem with that, but not with being notified of someone having a sip of coffee or some other banal non-information that twitter is renowned for.
Having said that, rolling twitter into your blog RSS would be crazy. But having it on a homepage or something (not pushed to the user) would be fine.
But, isn’t the answer to “what are you doing now” sometimes “posting my latest blog entry”?
I suppose, if the answer to “what are you doing?” is “writing a blog entry,” then it’s not so bad. But like Keith and Sarah said, the real annoyance is when these come from automated services that result in tweets with no personality and no editorial control. Like Sarah said in her blog post — if you want to occasionally notify us that you’ve got something new for us to read, I don’t have a big problem with that. But if you blog multiple times every day and you use some automated services to let us know about it, that’s just damn annoying. Sorry, @fling, but it is. When you use Twitter the way Brian does, you’re not answering “what are you doing?,” you’re just using Twitter as your PR agent.
Having said that, rolling twitter into your blog RSS would be crazy. But having it on a homepage or something (not pushed to the user) would be fine.
Right. And surely, if you think rolling Twitter into your blog RSS would be crazy, you would also think that automating your blog’s stream into Twitter would be equally annoying. :)
One could include certain tweets in the RSS of one’s blog. They are semantically the same as Asides. I do not include tweets that begin with ‘@’, so that half-conversation do not end up in my feed: How to ignore direct tweets in Wordpress explains in a post I wrote.
Including tweets in the RSS feed of your blog is great if your tweets offer nuggets of information or opinion. If they are “I’m eating a cookie now,” then no they should NOT be included in your RSS feed. If you don’t want a tweet to end up in your blog feed, then @yourself.
An added bonus is that I can receive comments on my tweets, since they become blog posts in their own right. Twitter doesn’t allow comments that stay connected to a certain tweet.
I don’t really disagree with anything you said, but I still think it’s best to offer the blog posts + tweets feed as an option, rather than as your only feed. Just the same, I think it’s best to make “asides” in your blog RSS an option, as well.
I get all of the stuff you mention here (like comments on my tweets), but I don’t force my tweets on anyone who doesn’t want them.
001 // Elliot Swan // 04.21.2008 // 1:29 PM
I don’t mind being notified via twitter of new blog posts, but I hate it when everything twittered shows up in the blog RSS feed. However, I understand that sometimes there’s stuff twittered worth being in the blog.
That’s why I’ve been using something I came up with that I’m calling “TweetRemote,” (soon to be available over at http://tweetremote.com), where I use hashtags to define the type of content I’m twittering. My scripts then can format the tweets (for example, posting “#image url cool!” in twitter would post the image to your blog along with your comments) and only post the ones meant for the blog as well. Not sure how well that makes sense, but hopefully it’ll be easier to see once I get the site up and whatnot. :)
I think it makes for a happy medium, anyway. Would you find that as annoying?
002 // Jeff Croft // 04.21.2008 // 1:58 PM
I’m curious — why is one way okay with you and not the other? If I subscribe to your twitter feed, it’s because I want your twitters. If I want your blog posts, I’ll subscribe to your blog feed. Give users a choice — don’t force yourself on them. It’s impolite.
I’m not totally sure I understand your TweetRemote concept, so it’s hard to tell if it would be as annoying or not. The bottom line for me is that users should have a choice. If I want your Tweets, I’ll subscribe to them. If I want your blog posts, I’ll subscribe to them. If I want your flickr photos, I’ll subscribe to them. I don’t need one feed notifying me of activity in the other — if I’d wanted that activity in the other, I would have already subscribed to the other. It just all feels like forcing yourself on others, which look desperate, pathetic, and lame to me, on top of being annoying.
But that’s just my opinion. :)
003 // Buster McLeod // 04.21.2008 // 3:19 PM
I found out about this post via Sarah’s twitter, and am sad to say that I commit the sin mentioned in this post of aggregating twitter content on my blog. But then again, I aggregate EVERYTHING on my blog, and probably annoy people all over the world constantly.
Then again, if you just want my “blog posts”, you can subscribe to just my LiveJournal. There are options out there, so many in fact, that one is paralyzed and forced to twitter frustration, dodgeball checkin at a bar at 11am, and post a picture of yourself kicking a kitten to Flickr.
004 // Jeff Croft // 04.21.2008 // 3:25 PM
Buster-
I also aggregate everything here on this site (blog posts, twitter tweets, flickr photos, ma.gnolia links, upcoming events, etc, etc.). I don’t think that is the sin. The sin is not giving people a way to subscribe to these thing individually if they want to. You and I both give people a way to subscribe or follow just one thing or the other.
So, at least to me, we’re totally innocent. :)
005 // Mike Stickel // 04.21.2008 // 3:30 PM
I see both sides of this. Twitter can be used as a great promotional tool. When it is used as such, hopefully your audience will enjoy that. If not, they’ll just go away. The trouble being that when you have interesting things to say, they’ll get lost in the promotional shuffle. My rule of thumb is to just leave those people altogether — I’m harsh that way.
When you want your website to be the aggregation of what you are around the web it can be a little tougher, but it shouldn’t. If I visit your website, I should be able to see everything you’re doing, if you choose to show me. If I subscribe to your website, I probably want specific topics or types of posts/information. It’s easy enough to offer different flavours of feeds that can suit just about any need. I just don’t know why people choose to be lazy and not give the audience a choice.
It’s all about choice people. Choose to wait for the nuggets of posts amongst all the linking on Twitter or choose to make an appropriately combined feed for your website.
006 // Sarah // 04.21.2008 // 3:31 PM
I actually subscribe to Buster’s “everything” feed, and though there are some duplicates of things I saw on Twitter or Flickr or Dodgeball already, there’s not so much that it’s annoying. If you start tweeting more, at least I have the option of subscribing to your individual streams, and that’s the key.
When people only offer one aggregated stream, either via RSS or by importing notifications into Twitter, they don’t give their readers a choice, except to stop following them completely. That’s an easy choice when it’s a random person I don’t know, but it’s much more difficult when the person in question is a friend or someone you really want to follow for personal reasons.
007 // Elliot Swan // 04.21.2008 // 5:20 PM
Well, I see one of the biggest things Twitter is used for is notification. This is where I am, this is what I’m doing, and in this case, this is what I’m writing. There have been times where I may subscribe to somebody’s tweets, but not their blog, though I’ll still sometimes click through their tweets to check out what they were just writing. Sometimes after a few times I’ll even find myself subscribing to the blog.
As for TweetRemote, maybe this will help explain:
To me, the annoying thing about tweets showing up on a blog/in the feed is that they are often very unrelated to the topic of the blog or simply not blog-worthy content. Sometimes, however, a tweet is blog-worthy. Say, for example, it’s a cool link related to the subject of your blog. In that case, you’d post something like this, and it’d show up on the blog like this. Or for an image, you could tweet this and this would show up on the blog.
008 // Sarah // 04.21.2008 // 5:32 PM
I don’t think people should take this to mean one should never post a link to a blog entry in their Twitter feed ever. One of the first things I said in my post was that Twitter is great for promoting something, and that you should feel free to do it occasionally.
My concern is with the automated services that do this for you every single time you post. Especially people who write blog entries frequently.
I would much rather see an occasional “Hey, I wrote something about [totally relevant topic] and I really want your feedback,” posted to someone’s Twitter, on occasion, when it’s relevant, than an automated “New blog post [link]” meaningless tweet that I’m just going to ignore because I’ll see what it’s about in my RSS reader later.
009 // Jeff Croft // 04.21.2008 // 5:49 PM
Elliot, I think what you’re doing there is very cool, in the sense that I appreciate the technology behind it and what you’ve done. However, I’m not sure that it’s very useful to your subscribers. It seems like, if I wanted to read your blog (i.e. subscribe to it in my RSS), and follow you on Twitter (like, say, get SMS notifications when you tweet), there would be no way to avoid duplicate content. That’s the part that gets annoying, for me. I’m annoyed if I get an SMS from someone saying “check out my blog post!” and then I get home to my RSS reader and I’ve got an unread item that it the exact same thing I got an SMS about earlier.
I get that you consider those tweet “blog-worthy,” and that’s totally cool. I’m not really concerned with what’s “blog-worthy” and what isn’t. What I’m interested in is not getting duplicate notifications (one through Twitter and one through RSS) every time one of my friends makes a blog entry or a tweet.
I think you, Elliot, could solve the issue by providing a feed of your blog posts that didn’t also include those tweets. If you did that, then I could subscribe to your blog, and follow you on twitter, and never get duplicate content. :)
010 // Elliot Swan // 04.21.2008 // 6:35 PM
Yeah, that’s totally understandable…I guess as long as they’re well-chosen and formatted nicely, it doesn’t really bother me. Though, I will be adding a tweet-free feed sometime soon for those who don’t like it.
011 // Keith // 04.21.2008 // 7:20 PM
I think this debate comes down to what I’ll call “editorial control”.
The problem I have with how some people use twitter is that they use it as a broadcast tool without any editorial control. Meaning they use fancy technology to update twitter automatically. This could be via RSS, Facebook, Brightkite, HypeMachine, etc. and it usually results in a pretty painful user experience for your followers.
Aggregation the other way; twitter to blog or feed is fine. Again, as long as you offer some ways for a follower to split that up.
(Oh shit. I just had an idea.)
What becomes painful, in both notification AND in the actual user experience is when you let services automatically update each other. I don’t mind the occasional blog link or song recommendation in my friend’s twttier feeds. But when that twitter feed becomes a replication of your Tumblr AND your blog’s RSS AND your lastfm playlist, etc. That’s when we’ve got a problem.
012 // Matt Wilcox // 04.22.2008 // 1:32 AM
But, isn’t the answer to “what are you doing now” sometimes “posting my latest blog entry”? I don’t see why anyone could have a problem with that, but not with being notified of someone having a sip of coffee or some other banal non-information that twitter is renowned for.
Having said that, rolling twitter into your blog RSS would be crazy. But having it on a homepage or something (not pushed to the user) would be fine.
013 // Jeff Croft // 04.22.2008 // 8:31 AM
I suppose, if the answer to “what are you doing?” is “writing a blog entry,” then it’s not so bad. But like Keith and Sarah said, the real annoyance is when these come from automated services that result in tweets with no personality and no editorial control. Like Sarah said in her blog post — if you want to occasionally notify us that you’ve got something new for us to read, I don’t have a big problem with that. But if you blog multiple times every day and you use some automated services to let us know about it, that’s just damn annoying. Sorry, @fling, but it is. When you use Twitter the way Brian does, you’re not answering “what are you doing?,” you’re just using Twitter as your PR agent.
Right. And surely, if you think rolling Twitter into your blog RSS would be crazy, you would also think that automating your blog’s stream into Twitter would be equally annoying. :)
014 // Stephen James // 05.01.2008 // 10:37 AM
One could include certain tweets in the RSS of one’s blog. They are semantically the same as Asides. I do not include tweets that begin with ‘@’, so that half-conversation do not end up in my feed: How to ignore direct tweets in Wordpress explains in a post I wrote.
Including tweets in the RSS feed of your blog is great if your tweets offer nuggets of information or opinion. If they are “I’m eating a cookie now,” then no they should NOT be included in your RSS feed. If you don’t want a tweet to end up in your blog feed, then @yourself.
An added bonus is that I can receive comments on my tweets, since they become blog posts in their own right. Twitter doesn’t allow comments that stay connected to a certain tweet.
015 // Jeff Croft // 05.01.2008 // 10:48 AM
Stephen-
I don’t really disagree with anything you said, but I still think it’s best to offer the blog posts + tweets feed as an option, rather than as your only feed. Just the same, I think it’s best to make “asides” in your blog RSS an option, as well.
I get all of the stuff you mention here (like comments on my tweets), but I don’t force my tweets on anyone who doesn’t want them.