Twitter

When it comes to posting online about my own personal misfortune, I have one simple rule. Don't talk about it until you can tell the story with a sense of humor. Yet, when it comes to a visible personal injury the first question you inevitably have to answer is, "What happened to you"? Three weeks ago, I was in a bicycle accident where I landed on my shoulder and broke my clavicle (collar bone). I'm better now, but I'm still wearing an arm sling. My first attempt of bringing humor to the situation was on Twitter.

I'm starting to think exercising is hazardous to your health. Visiting the doc.

Earlier this week, I questioned whether social media could replace my need to blog. In my article, I mentioned that Google+ and LinkedIn as social network platforms are able to provide near blog-like functions. Since that article posted, I've already heard comments from my Facebook and Twitter friends that no one uses Google+. I respectfully disagree with my friends. While people like to call Google+ a ghost town the numbers would indicate otherwise.

Research by Searchmetrics identifies most tweeted newspaper stories in 2013

New York - January 09, 2014 - The Washington Post, New York Times and USA Today figure in the top three positions in a study which analyzes prominent US newspaper websites for their popularity on social network, Twitter.

Content from USA Today and the Washington Post was also found to dominate the list of the top ten most tweeted newspaper website stories during 2013 in the study by digital marketing software and services company, Searchmetrics.

Ever since social media and social networks have gone mainstream, our digital lives have become complicated. There are a number of social media management tools already out on the market that aim to give users the tools they need to better mange, filter, and prioritize the content they read from their favorite blogs and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Almost all these tools fall short of their intended goals and why I'm always on the lookout for something better to come along. 

There are some people blessed with the rare skill of saying something of value under 140 characters or less. One of those people is Addison Berry. Addi is an active contributor to the Drupal open source project, Lullabot team member, and former civil servant . Two tweets from Twitter by Addison Berry that made me smile when I first read them can be found below.

"I find the kinder and gentler I am to myself, the kinder and gentler I am to others."

We made it! We made Jon Marks' updated Follow Forty Twitter CMS Gurus list.

So, you want to follow the CMS world on Twitter. How about the ability to follow the creme de la creme of the CMS Twitterati in a couple of clicks. Well, my friend, you’ve struck gold. [UPDATE: Even more gold than promised. The list is growing. More than 40]

Better yet, if you read the comments, we were added after some controversy. By the way, Jon has correctly included himself in the list.

My local newspaper, the Argus Leader, contains an article about "Twitter fever" finally arriving in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  The start of the article is interesting to read.

Following blogs online takes too much time. So Mike Vetter, 24, uses Twitter to keep up with friends and follow the short posts or "tweets" by people in his business.

"Twitter is called microblogging - small blogs - only up to 140 characters at a time," says Vetter, CEO of DataSync, a Sioux Falls software company. "If I were to follow 50 people blogging, I would be reading all day long. This way I can get the point, boiled down. It's blogging for lazy people."

Isn't that ironic?  When blogging first became popular some of the criticisms bloggers heard was that blogs were too short and not polished enough.  The thought was that blog posts would never hold the same attention by readers compared to real articles and stories written elsewhere.  Now we forward forward to the present and we find that blogs contain too many words which is what spurring the Twitter movement.  The length of a tweet is limited by 140 characters (roughly about the same as a text message in a cell phone).

Following this line of thought, I'm now convinced that by the time my five year old son becomes a teenager he'll call Twitter too inefficient.  Instead his generation and their even shorter attention span will require you to send messages at 7 characters or less.  What would we call this new service, Twit?

After three decades of embracing technology, I think I finally arrived between the old way and the new ways of doing things.  My case in point, I found this article in the print version of my Sunday newspaper.  At the same time, I'm ready to read what you think of the article via my Twitter account.