On Twitter and Shorts

I’m experimenting with a self-hosted Twitter-style multi-user blog at www.shortsay.com. It uses a modified version of the P2 theme.

Anyone can login using their webmail or Facebook account to post or comment.

The experiment is because I like the short post format, but feel Twitter has some limitations.

I opened my Twitter account on March 23, 2007, but quickly lost interest until recently. As of today, I have made 402 posts.

The concept of short updates has grown on me and I like the sense of community that Twitter now offers.

I feel that I’ve “met” more people through Twitter than blogging or Facebook.

A few weeks ago I made a conscious decision to use Twitter mostly for media-related posts. I actively sought other journalists and editors as friends and followers.

I now have 104 followers and I’m happy with that number. I follow 79 people and I enjoy reading their updates. If there were more it could become difficult to manage.

Most of my followers are friends, fellow bloggers and journalists with a few politicians who follow me because I follow them.

Ironically, as my Twitter usage has become more targeted I feel less comfortable about making bland random posts.

Politicians and editors don’t want to know what I had for breakfast or the score in my daughter’s hockey game.

I expect their posts to be meaningful, so mine should be as well.

That’s where Short Say comes in.

I host the content and control the design. Visitors come because they want to or they stumbled there by accident.

Twitter pushes a post to a reader. A self-hosted site draws readers to the post.

There’s a place for both and I’ve achieved some integration by synchronising all my new Twitter posts with Short Say using a WordPress plugin.

But whereas I’m self conscious about making potentially trivial remarks on Twitter I can write whatever I like on Short Say.

Neither replaces this blog because, by design and definition, the others are for short posts.