I've been playing around with Twitter recently and my experiments have led me to two different conclusions.

Thinking vs. Doing vs. Disseminating
Twitter asks, "What are you doing?" as a prompt for each update. Right now most of the people I'm following on Twitter are my team members and it's useful to know when they're taking long lunches during crunch time or busting ass on a Saturday to hit code complete, but these updates are less interesting to me than ones that answer the question, "What are you thinking?" These 'thinking' updates are often funny or ironic, and sometimes even edifying. I welcome more of this in my life, and probably need less frequent or granular information on people's whereabouts. Maybe this is just a function of my advanced age (35) or inability to take advantage of a friend's proximity due to family responsibilities.

My favorite thinking updates are serendipitous insights, sort of mini Aha! or light bulb moments. I don't expect people to Twitter about the secret sauce or their new business model, but people have interesting ideas every day that are interesting, but that they are never going to execute upon. I'd like to see the flow and velocity of those types of ideas increase and I think Twitter is a great way to accomplish this.

Yet another Twitter type is the dissemination update. For me, these updates often duplicate pieces of news or blog posts I've already consumed and digested via my regular news sources: WSJ, NewsGator (my OPML), and recently, Topix.net. I primarily read Twitter updates on my phone and even though I have a browser I'm unlikely to open up and read blog posts on it.

I'd love it if people had separate Twitter feeds for their doing, thinking, and disseminating posts. If they did, I'd subscribe to the thinking feeds and probably skip the others. I'm sure Fred Wilson gets many more subscribers to the VC/technology feed of his A VC blog, as opposed to the music feed, for the same targeting reasons.


30 words vs. 300 words, vs. 300 pages
Next time you have a good idea, think about whether you can get the point across to intelligent folks in 30 words or less. If so, then maybe a Twitter update is the way to go, or a blog post with "<eom>" at the end of the subject line so people don't have to read further. Most 300 or 3,000 word blog posts could have been better said better in 30 words (perhaps this post is an example). Excellent, well-written posts by Kathy Sierra, Richard MacManus, and others are the exception.

I've read a number of technology books over the past year that should have also been much, much shorter. Tip: If you are writing a book and this table of contents would fit...

Chapter 1: Great idea
Chapter 2: Examples
Chapter 3: Examples
Chapter 4: Examples
Chapter 5: Examples
Chapter 6: Examples
Chapter 7: Examples
Chapter 8: Recap of great idea

...then maybe you should just write a long blog post or a pamphlet instead. If Gregor Mendel can explain how heredity works in 41 pages then you can explain first impressions or how technology makes outsourcing easier in less.

Where was I? Oh yeah, I was rambling on about how I often start blog posts but never finish them because I know they are going to become too long-winded and I lack the time or energy to make them more concise. Either that or I just don't think they deserve a full blog post, let alone a whole book. From now on, I think I'll just Twitter most of them instead.

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