On Twitter

So I've been pretty delinquent in blogging as I've allowed myself, after much hemming and hawing, to get hooked on Twitter. The reasons for this are essentially threefold:

Fold #1: To justify a blog post, you have to have a topic worthy of approximately 400 words of expostulating. Sure you can stray a little and write shorter or longer posts, but ultimately that's the length that feels about right to me, so that's the metric I tend to use when deciding whether to blog or not. With Twitter, though, you only need an idea worthy of 140 characters, which is more or less the bare minimum amount of space I need to complete a thought. Even a half-baked one.

Fold #2: Similarly, since the standards for what merits a worthwhile tweet are so much lower, your dumber tweets get diluted by those that are marginally less dumb. The sheer quantity tends to make you forget the crappier things you set forth into the digital universe. Somehow a blog feels more like a memoir, like someone might dredge up something you wrote and hold you accountable for it, even just over drinks in a bar, and you have to actually entertain the subject because they spent 5 minutes reading your post instead of 30 seconds skimming a tweet so you can't just say "who cares?" because clearly they cared, or thought they did, and you wasted five of their precious minutes.

Fold #3: Ultimately, and a little embarrassingly, what most motivates me to participate in social media is feedback, or rather engagement. And while the whole @ mention and re-tweet thing hasn't exactly been a thriving source of adulation for yours truly, linking my tweets to my Facebook status has yielded near constant response. So while I know thirty some-odd people who tweet and maybe a handful (and that's generous) who would read my blog on a regular basis if I committed to updating on a regular basis, it seems my real adoring, if sporadic, public is on Facebook. Probably because people are visiting Facebook for totally separate reasons (stalking their exes? seeing who got married or fat?) and my comments on my prom dresses are totally incidental.