I’m glad I have a Facebook account, so I can see what my friends are doing (or obsessing about). I enjoy reading my Twitter feed, for the occasional brilliantly pithy comment. I’m pleased with Google+, because it solves two big problems with Twitter (by letting me group the people I’m following into categories and by eliminating the arbitrary 140-character limit).
And yet, whenever I post anything substantive in any of those venues, I end up regretting that I didn’t post it here, and just link to it there.
There are several reasons, but they’re all related: the material is harder for me to find, harder for me to link to, harder for me to relate to all the other stuff I’ve written (and am going to write). When I post it somewhere else, the material is less useful.
So, I’m going to re-center my social writing here. I’ll still use Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to comment on what other people write, and I’m sure I’ll occasionally use them to post brief items that I think will be of interest to my readers in those places in particular (and to re-share interesting bits in the place where I find them). But my substantive social writing will be here.
I’ve been thinking we should externalize some (maybe most) of our IM conversations (perhaps via twitter). Other people might join in and/or find our conversations interesting.
It’s not even the strangest idea I’ve heard so far today.
I think blogging and then linking to the blog post on whatever social media account is the best way to do it. Linking to the blog post “prompts” people who would be interested in what you have to say to visit your site.
The problem, of course, is trying to have a cohesive conversation afterward. I have responded to your blog posts in the past on Facebook, on G+, and on the comment field on this site. Where do you prefer comments to happen? There should be a way to somehow coalesce all these methods into a single entity. I would love to see tighter integration of blogs and social media – for instance, a way to “integrate” WordPress blog posts into G+ – where I can hit “See entire blog post…” and have it shown inline on G+, and comments posted and shown here will be the comments generated on the post on G+. But I suppose that’s a pipe dream, for now.
Yes, that’s exactly the issue, and I’m conflicted.
Personally, I like comments here—it’s the place where I’ll find them again, if I revisit a post. In particular, if I link to a post, because I’m discussing something related, it’s great to see the previous discussion. Then it can inform the new post I’m writing.
Having said that, I’m sure that a lot of people who follow me on one or more of the social media sites don’t follow my blog, and even among those who do, most of them don’t check back here to see if there have been comments. But a prompt comment on Facebook will often be seen by many people who wouldn’t have come here (and perhaps by a few who had already come here, but wouldn’t have been checking back).
I guess my best hope is that shifting more of the discussion here will prompt other people to come back and look at the comments, so that eventually it will be clear that this is the place for comments and discussion. But until that happens, feel free to comment anywhere. I’ll see the comment wherever you put it.