Keyvan Nayyeri

These days Twitter has become a famous site on the web and the vanguard in the new rising field of micro-blogging. In the past few months it could find its place among ordinary web users and is going to be an influential website among web 2.0 sites and services.

I’ve been a member of one of the first groups of users who joined to this site and have been actively tweeting for over 25 months. This has helped me to see the progress of the site both from the number of users and adjunct services point of view, and from the content transition view.

Originally Twitter started as a site that had become a place for users to update their personal status and the task that they’re busy with, but after a few months, people could find some secondary goals for it and chose a name for this type of service and called it micro-blogging. At this point, some competitors came to the play, and some adjunct sites were created to offer extra features for Twitter users.

The progress on Twitter continued by a smooth transition to technical content and the usage of services and hashtags to change the role of Twitter as the fastest online option to notify people of an event. The widespread usage of Twitter during the United States election and other political and technical events helped Twitter to be known for this new role.

However, in the past few months I’ve felt that there is no progress with Twitter and it’s just growing with more users, and I don’t see any invention in this field anymore. Besides, all the competitors of Twitter appear to be unable to keep this competition anymore, and Twitter has found its place as a unique service in the field.

But my intention of this post was not a historical overview of Twitter. As you can see, in the past few months the ratio of my blog posts has been dropped to a noticeable extent. While it’s obvious that I’m investing more time in writing original content with better quality and this should be one of the reasons, I also realized that short posts and those that were referencing other’s content don’t have a place on my blog anymore. After thinking about this, I found that Twitter and micro-blogging is the place where I publish such items, and don’t let them to appear here on my blog.

Doing a quick research on some fellow bloggers and their activity progress in the past months of their appearance on Twitter, I determined that same thing has happened to them, and generally blogging, in its traditional form, is not that active anymore, or at least it’s my feeling based on the content quality that I read.

People prefer to personalize their discussions on Twitter and make everything short because Twitter ameliorates the lack of awareness of your audience to some extent. They also try to save their time from publishing blog posts that typically take more time than tweeting, and prefer to spend that time on other stuff or writing more valuable posts.

All in all, I think that Twitter is enforcing blogosphere to change its path toward micro-blogging, and the traditional form of blogging doesn’t have that value anymore.