I jumped into an esoteric debate Wednesday evening: What is the most effective way mainstream media can use social media like Twitter? Should they never post RSS feeds automatically? Must every tweet be crafted by human hands?
Notice that I don’t say “old media,” because I happen to think that term is bull. Plenty of supposedly “old media” outlets have been on the Web since the earliest days and produce innovative multimedia content that is as good as or better than anything found elsewhere in the “new media.” But that doesn’t make for a good story. (Yes, plenty of old media practitioners still have their heads in the sand. And I don’t claim to have figured it all out — my point is, nobody has figured it out. The Web is 20 minutes old. Nobody knows anything.)
Anyway, the first thing I re-learned was how hard it is to have an extended discussion on Twitter. My Tweets are in one place, under my updates. The other person’s replies are somewhere else, and I can’t even link to them easily on Twitter. I have to use this search tool. Messages are limited to 140 characters. We’re surrounded by a cloud of unrelated tweets by others, in varying degrees of engagement, who also might get annoyed if you’re posting every 30 seconds.
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