When I first started blogging back in 2000 (we just called it writing in those days), there weren’t very many blogs yet, so it was easier to get visitors and decent traffic by posting quality content on a regular basis. This was back before the time of MySpace and Facebook, before social networks, Gawker, Vayniacs, Flickr, Last.fm, and that kind of thing. There were just websites and the people who created them. Not so different from what we have today, but different tools, fewer people, and a lot more uncharted territory. The playing field was wide open, and everything felt new.
To be honest, I really don’t look back on those times a some kind of golden era, because although what we thought of as the web was much more simple, behind the scenes, everything was a lot more tedious and complicated. Things are beautiful and simple and amazing today. Anybody, even a novice, can get themselves heard in ways we couldn’t have ever imagined back then.
The web is a lot more grown up today than it was when I first got started writing here about 9 years ago. We have more mature publishing tools. We have CSS. Web standards are important, and everybody knows it. We have cool social networks. We have, comparatively speaking, very stable network connectivity and server reliability. These things are all conducive, I think, to a more stable web.
So over the years we’ve built this thing people call the personal web. A big collection of individual websites, blogs, blogrolls, linked lists, online presences.
But the social networks are changing things. In the same way that Apple’s iPhone was a game-changer and a destabilizer, some of today’s newer websites and social-networks, especially really great sites like Twitter, are destabilizing and tweaking the way we think about the so-called personal web. Some people would even say that sites like Twitter are killing the personal web.
I’ve been using Twitter since 2006 when it first launched. It feels like a million years ago, and thinking back, I can’t even remember how I first heard about it. Of course, it’s since exploded, and I’ll go so far as to say it’s mainstream now (NPR coverage, two times, is always an indication).
In case you don’t know what Twitter is, here’s what the website says about it:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Twitter serves a completely different purpose than this website. For me, Twitter has become a sieve, a filter, and a repository for information that entertains but that doesn’t quite warrant an full-on article or post, and I think this phenomenon has swept across the web, cleaning things up a bit, and putting many sites on a diet. Twitter really shines in soliciting a response to short thoughts, quick exchanges, and simple ideas. It’s great at kicking off a dialog. What’s left behind is space for better writing, more fully developed thoughts, and in-depth discussion. I think Tom Browning really hit the nail on the head earlier today when he said that Twitter creates a more level playing field.
I see Twitter as supplementary to this website, to my “online presence.” It couldn’t replace the kind of writing I like to do here, but it’s certainly a great way to compliment it. If you’re using Twitter and would like to follow me, you can do that here.
Things Are Changing
My friend Jeffrey Zeldman eloquently expressed the effect Twitter has had on his own website:
There are blog posts here, but I post Tweets far more frequently than I write posts. (For obvious reasons: when you’re stuck in an airport, it’s easier to send a 140-character post via mobile phone and Twitter than it is to write an essay from that same airport. Or really from anywhere. Writing is hard, like design.) I have more readers here than followers at Twitter, but that could change. Are they the same readers? Increasingly, to the best of my knowledge, there are people who follow me on Twitter but do not read zeldman.com (and vice-versa). This is good (I’m getting new readers) and arguably maybe not so good (my site, no longer the core of my brand, is becoming just another piece of it).
When I read that post in early 2008, I thought he might have been jumping the gun a bit. But in recent weeks, I’ve noticed that once prolific writers are slowing down, or worse, transforming their sites into “hubs” that merely collect the random bits of information they’re sharing elsewhere, aggregating their Twitter posts, Flickr stream, Facebook updates, and Delicious bookmarks into a one-page, tedious, single-serving website sporting oversized fonts and giant outbound links.
In a way, this kind of thing isn’t all bad. Maybe the people who weren’t really into publishing their own sites now have a better way to communicate with their audience. But do these changes mean that the personal web dying?
Andy Budd seems to be struggling with the issue:
Rather than publishing fully formed ideas on your own website, you could post snippets of an idea with much more ease and to a more targeted audience. So I started to find that my desire to express myself was sated by a stream of nano thought published to Twitter rather than a few bigger ideas published to my blog. The format my be different, but the psychological result was the same.
Dave Shea recently wrote:
I’ve come to realize that my content-creating has become a lot more distributed, which means the long-form post format of this site has been seeing less and less love in recent years. Much has been written about Twitter killing the urge to write longer blog posts, and I won’t dispute that as a cause […] So for the past month I’ve been working on a way of piecing together content I produce on other sites and funnel relevant bits into a stream that I could present on this site.
While Twitter seems to make some people want to write and blog less often or at a slower pace, I’ve found that I’ve been inspired to write and publish much more often. I think it’s because of the inherent constraints of Twitter, the 140-character limit, that I’m driven to write more frequently here. Certain topics, ideas, and conversations fit perfectly within that kind of space while others beg for the bigger space, the larger expanse of an article.
Maybe this is because I’m lucky enough to already have an audience reading this site (and I do mean that, I feel incredibly lucky every day that you visit this site —thank you.) Maybe it’s because I have an English degree and I think writing is enjoyable and important.
Or maybe I’m just old fashioned. Although I use a feed reader, for example, it’s just a starting point to let me know what’s new. I still use a web browser to actually visit websites and read the articles, just like I always have. There’s something personal that I like about that kind of experience. Like maybe the authors have invited me into their living room. I get a glimpse into their life and get to see things framed the way they want, enjoy the experience they’ve crafted. Presentation can play a big role in the way we experience content.
You’ve Got To Be Everywhere to Be Somewhere
I don’t think the personal web is dying, but I do think it’s changing. I think people who weren’t serious about building their own brands, about writing, and about creating that singular space that a website with unique content offers will focus on third party sites and social networks, where great tools and big audiences make it far easier and possibly even more fun to build an online presence.
I also think that in order to have the kind of success we enjoyed five to ten years ago — just by showing up and dropping solid content — the personalities behind today’s personal sites need to be bigger than they needed to be in the past.
I’ll go one step further: I don’t think it’s possible to have a successful presence or brand today without being a part of the social networks, without contributing more than just one kind of content, without using multiple channels. I think Twitter is awesome, and all of these channels are a great way to get involved in some excellent communities, in a way a single blog just can’t. Hey, check the sidebar or my contact page and you’ll see, I’m using them all too.
But I have no plans to stop writing and publishing here. Actually, I still feel like I’m just getting started.
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cnick
04 January 2009 at 6:10 pm
Hi Dan,
Great entry, couldn’t agree more.
Your old and new entries are lots of times a good reference that keeps us coming back and searching your website.
Cheers
Spencer Greenwood
04 January 2009 at 6:16 pm
I have a lot of concerns about the growth of Twitter. As you say, it’s a wonderful tool. Without it, I wouldn’t have half the readership or feel half as much a part of a community of readers and bloggers as I do, but I know that its gain is at the loss of good blog posts. And that’s worrying for a number of reasons.
Twitter, as I commented today to Dave Winer, archives information very poorly. http://search.twitter.com/ is really useful for discovering what who was saying about what at which time, but it only goes so far, and it is dependent on the tweet actually using some keywords, which means that it could potentially exclude some gems. Ultimately, it’s less permanent than, say, the comments section of a blog when it comes to recording conversations. I can easily follow conversations in blog comment threads, unless the blog is overwhelmingly popular. Twitter makes that nigh-on impossible.
And call me old-fashioned, but I prefer long-form writing. I like to read an essay and divine profundity from it at my leisure. I dislike the abruptness, concision and immediacy of tweets. I can see the benefits of these qualities, but I like to leave them to others. Twitter means that I have to engage with them, too.
Luke Dorny
04 January 2009 at 6:47 pm
Great writeup, Mr. Benjamin.
It confirms what we’ve all felt and secretly (or not so secretly) thought about the web as a whole (and whether you like twitter or not).
It also confirms that great blogposts or ‘writings’ are not dead or irrelevant. Thanks for taking the time.
And for reference, I’m just barely starting my weblog. I’ve used flickr.com as my quasi-blog for years now.
David
04 January 2009 at 7:09 pm
I’d like to echo Spencer’s point above about the lack of adequate data archiving and (especially!) portability options that come along with a lot of these hosted services. Twitter is certainly no exception - it took me a good amount of fiddling with curl and the Twitter API to download all of my past tweets as XML. For some reason, I’ve never been able to get some of the third-party sites that claim to be able to do this to work quite right. But this kind of thing (“let me easily download all of my content on this service”) should be built-in to Twitter itself.
Tangentially, this entry got me interested in finding some of my old websites from the 90s and early 2000s in the Wayback Machine. Although the archive is very much incomplete, there’s enough still out there that I was able to “re-live” some key moments of my late teens and early to mid-20s through online journal entries.
There’s something quite different about reading a well-thought out journal/blog post that just can’t be captured in a Twitter post or a Facebook status update.
Geof F. Morris
04 January 2009 at 7:49 pm
I look at Twitter as more of a conversation—-IRC for the late aughts—-than anything else. This takes me to Sir Francis Bacon: “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” I Tweet a lot of things that I’m not really quite ready to fully write up. I also answer that “What are you doing?” question quite often. And lastly, I swear a lot to keep from swearing at people at work. :)
Spencer Alexander
04 January 2009 at 9:43 pm
I’m not a Twitter user myself, and I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Tweets. In fact, I’d go as far to say that I avoid reading Tweets if at all possible, and that they’ve negatively affected my web browsing; whenever I’m browsing blog posts and come across a post around 140 characters, I assume it is a tweet and skip it, even when it is just a helpful summary of the useful article hidden behind the link.
That being said, I’m trying to enjoy Twitter; I’ve joined the service, making two posts in the last four months, and I’m occasionally reading the entries of my close friends.
I do echo the feelings of the above commenters as well; Twitter works much better as a quick conversation than a medium to share your thoughts. I’m glad to hear that Twitter makes you write more often, but I’m saddened by all of the quality writing that has been replaced by Tweets.All I can hope is that I’ll start enjoying this massive online conversation sooner rather than later.
Mike Roberto
04 January 2009 at 10:34 pm
Excellent post Dan. I’ve been a developer and reader of what I consider to the web design and development circle since the late 90’s. Being an observer of the network for the past decade its been interesting to see how things have changed and are changing now.
I’ve recently started to get serious about publishing some of my own content and your observations on the impact of social networks and twitter are really poignant. It’s been a struggle to get started with so many possible outlets for content. That’s one of the challenges of today’s web is that there are so many options. But you hit the nail on the head it’s about contributing in all the arenas, but playing to your strengths to deliver the best overall package.
Good stuff!
Ryan Burrell
05 January 2009 at 10:57 am
Good viewpoint, and I agree wholeheartedly with the practical implications of getting your name out there via a variety of different mediums.
I do use Twitter, and Facebook, and FriendFeed, and delicious, etc. I guess the problem that I have is the feeling that you’re not one of the “cool kids” unless you become a social networking whore, and that puts me at a dilemma in their usage. I feel like your content should promote itself, not the medium you use to show your content.
Alex Rudloff
05 January 2009 at 11:07 am
Great post Dan.
For awhile, Twitter was making me blog maybe not more often, but more focused. Lately, I don’t know.. I’m starting to lean towards the hub concept myself. Mixture of reasons I guess, but considering I’ve been “blogging” in some shape or form since freshman year at ucf (99), that says to me something is ‘different’.
Your point about channels is spot on. Blogs aren’t the end all be all now, the discussions are no longer so one dimensional.
zeldman
05 January 2009 at 4:11 pm
Great post, Dan. Twitter’s constraints inspire me to write better, wherever I write. (Reading Dashiell Hammett has the same effect.) Having multiple channels is fun, although I miss having everything in one place. It used to feel like zeldman.com was bottomless and could be anything. Now zeldman.com feels like a place for a particular kind of content, and other kinds of content go on other services (services I don’t run).
Alain
05 January 2009 at 7:07 pm
The notion that services like Twitter and Facebook are effecting long-form blogging has been gaining traction for some time now. I’m hosting a talk on the subject at this year’s SXSW, focusing on whether personal blogs are truly being eclipsed by social networking sites. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but that Facebook is damned addictive!
If you’re attending SXSW, please stop by and say hi. I’d love to chat more about this.
Jeff Solomon
06 January 2009 at 12:07 am
Great post, Dan.
There are a lot of great tools out there, and what your post got at- for me- is the fact that it’s not just the medium that matters, but the content.
Good content will rule forever, and you are a provider of said.
Duffy Brook
12 January 2009 at 10:48 pm
Your post is a very well argued counterpoint to one claiming the other side of the Twitter debate:
http://ldopa.net/2008/11/11/twitter-is-fucking-retarded/
Personally the jury’s still out. I find that I don’t follow Twitter throughout the day, but try to catch up in the evening when I have time to read blogs and other net news. (killed the TV years ago)
Problem with that is any replies I would’ve sent have long since (as in hours) lost timeliness, and twittering late seems as feeble as a holiday card arriving in mid-January.
I do appreciate your take from an old-timer’s perspective… keep it coming.