This was going to be a meta-post about my own blog, and why I am so bad at keeping it up to date. Last night we cooked dinner with some friends and I made a comment that anyone who wanted their blog to be significant to the blogosphere had better be posting a least once a day, if not multiple times a day. I made this comment without a lot of thought, but then came to thinking “is that really true?”
What do we expect from the blogs we follow on a daily basis. For that matter, what is our expectation on status updates (micro-blogging) via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc?
On Whrrl, the product of the company I work for, I tend to update my status multiple times a day (often whenever I check in at a new location). This makes sense to me – I want to contextualize the other piece of information I am sharing about where I am. For example, if I check in at the office I am likely to update my status to “Danielle is whrrking” or if I check in at Purple Wine Bar I’m likely to say something like “Danielle is tipping back a great glass of claret”. On Facebook, I update my status a couple of times each week on average. Although I check my Facebook profile for messages and updates nearly daily I don’t remember to update my status unless I see someone else post an interesting status. Rarely do I go to Facebook explicitly to update my status – in fact I would say I never do.
Twitter is somewhere I text/go explicitly to update my status and answer the question “what are you doing right now?” because that is the point of the service (although people are using it for micro-blogging and posting links and whatnot now). It isn’t hard to post an update to Twitter, sending a text to the shortcode is probably the easiest text command I use on my low-tech phone. Offer my “tweets” will come in sporadic bursts, maybe 6 in a day and then radio silence for the rest of the week. I don’t feel much of a need to space them out though – I feel like it is expected that I will lifestream on Twitter in a way I don’t do on Facebook or Whrrl.
This all culminates into the obnoxious noise that is my FriendFeed, loaded with so much crap even I don’t want to read it. Who wants to see the long list of articles I’ve shared, changes I’ve made to profiles, status updates in multiple locations (which become annoying duplicate/cross posts when viewed in FriendFeed). It is just overload – and then on top of monitoring FriendFeed (which I’m not doing regularly, btw) I have email, GoogleReader, and stupid voicemail (for those people still stuck in the stone age, like my parents).
The thing is, sometimes I will have moments of “oh man, I should just disconnect all of this” but it isn’t just an “online-life” anymore – it is my connection to people in the real world. Disconnecting online really does hinder my ability to keep in touch with my real world friends. Sounds like they have me hooked. I think this bodes well for Whrrl, but I’ve still got to figure out to manage all this information in my life. I can’t wait for 5 years from now, with all the technology being developed around solving this problem.
If you actually update your status on LinkedIn I’d be interested to hear about what kind of things you write there. So far, I’ve been a bit baffled about how to use that feature in that context.