At the present moment, status updates are disposable, fire&forget comments which may or may not invoke a conversation.
They are short for easy digestion with the most popular being limited to 140 characters. Fitting an intended cause or detailed message into one without going out of context requires a certain level of skill hence the most common usage is usually, but not limited to, daily rants or updates of lunch menus.
For this very reason, it is close to superfluous to include a twitter stream on your website apart from informing your viewers that you have an account and may or may not be actively participating in the medium but they should follow you nonetheless; sites are guilty of posting updates on their twitter account which streams itself onto the website where the updates are posted in an infinite recursion. You are lucky if the sites are even updating their twitter accounts at this point, sites I've been to have active front pages but an outdated stream.
So, what's the point?
A centralised hub for conversations is an attractive thing, everyone gets their own @username and a voice to call their own. It's nice to put a number to your followers and know, at the drop of a hat, that your followers may be listening when you announce something depending on the @replies you receive. That is, if anyone is listening at all.
People are adding other people adding other people but useful conversations that matter are far and few. This is nothing new to the internets. Blogging has been the preferred mode of communication in the past albeit a lot more effort for all involved. BBS and forums of virtual communities were other venues. Twitter just made it accessible and short, no effort required; Facebook hides behind a walled garden.
But what does this mean to the creative?
Participation with others on twitter is nice but it is somebody else's platform, you want your viewers to spend time on your site.
You have your blog where you elucidate your viewers of your recent endeavours with a wall of text and maybe images, you have your main site where you showcase your products and projects, you may even have a place for your twitter stream where you may or may not remember to exclude non-work related topics. Your viewers are able to communicate with you directly via email or a contact form, they may even engage a conversation or discussion with you via your blog. But what happens if you just want to post blurbs of updates that are pertinent to the current status of your projects or products and not want those updates to get lost amidst blog posts?
Well, here's http://boot-str.appspot.com/about/mod/note.
Mod note is many things but mostly, it is a means of publishing a comment. When a viewer logs in to comment on a bootstrapped site, they are granted their own profile page where they can update their status with text, links, images and youtube videos which can be automatically embedded. From here, other viewers are able to comment on their status updates thus creating an instant community base for your viewers, all within your site.
Mod note also translates easily into a forum and an imageboard should you wish to. All of these are based on exactly the same things; a site wide commenting system.
And this is the solution. You post a status update which is imported to the front page to inform your viewers of your current status of a project, you can pick the last 5 or 15 or just the one. These updates can live on a seperate page, a page purely for updates or posted on your main page, with links allowing your viewers to comment on or share.
Hell, we might even make it so you can even push those updates to twitter easily without ever leaving your site if you really need to and unlike twitter, you are able to manage your content (only you can delete/hide them), you own all of your data, the comments that are attached to each update and the viewers that are attached to those comments.
And before you ask, of course I'm using it :}
Some examples:
http://www.esyou.com/shi
http://boot-str.appspot.com/
http://gen-information.appspot.com/
They are short for easy digestion with the most popular being limited to 140 characters. Fitting an intended cause or detailed message into one without going out of context requires a certain level of skill hence the most common usage is usually, but not limited to, daily rants or updates of lunch menus.
For this very reason, it is close to superfluous to include a twitter stream on your website apart from informing your viewers that you have an account and may or may not be actively participating in the medium but they should follow you nonetheless; sites are guilty of posting updates on their twitter account which streams itself onto the website where the updates are posted in an infinite recursion. You are lucky if the sites are even updating their twitter accounts at this point, sites I've been to have active front pages but an outdated stream.
So, what's the point?
A centralised hub for conversations is an attractive thing, everyone gets their own @username and a voice to call their own. It's nice to put a number to your followers and know, at the drop of a hat, that your followers may be listening when you announce something depending on the @replies you receive. That is, if anyone is listening at all.
People are adding other people adding other people but useful conversations that matter are far and few. This is nothing new to the internets. Blogging has been the preferred mode of communication in the past albeit a lot more effort for all involved. BBS and forums of virtual communities were other venues. Twitter just made it accessible and short, no effort required; Facebook hides behind a walled garden.
But what does this mean to the creative?
Participation with others on twitter is nice but it is somebody else's platform, you want your viewers to spend time on your site.
You have your blog where you elucidate your viewers of your recent endeavours with a wall of text and maybe images, you have your main site where you showcase your products and projects, you may even have a place for your twitter stream where you may or may not remember to exclude non-work related topics. Your viewers are able to communicate with you directly via email or a contact form, they may even engage a conversation or discussion with you via your blog. But what happens if you just want to post blurbs of updates that are pertinent to the current status of your projects or products and not want those updates to get lost amidst blog posts?
Well, here's http://boot-str.appspot.com/about/mod/note.
Mod note is many things but mostly, it is a means of publishing a comment. When a viewer logs in to comment on a bootstrapped site, they are granted their own profile page where they can update their status with text, links, images and youtube videos which can be automatically embedded. From here, other viewers are able to comment on their status updates thus creating an instant community base for your viewers, all within your site.
Mod note also translates easily into a forum and an imageboard should you wish to. All of these are based on exactly the same things; a site wide commenting system.
And this is the solution. You post a status update which is imported to the front page to inform your viewers of your current status of a project, you can pick the last 5 or 15 or just the one. These updates can live on a seperate page, a page purely for updates or posted on your main page, with links allowing your viewers to comment on or share.
Hell, we might even make it so you can even push those updates to twitter easily without ever leaving your site if you really need to and unlike twitter, you are able to manage your content (only you can delete/hide them), you own all of your data, the comments that are attached to each update and the viewers that are attached to those comments.
And before you ask, of course I'm using it :}
Some examples:
http://www.esyou.com/shi
http://boot-str.appspot.com/
http://gen-information.appspot.com/
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10 years ago shi commented on Dr. Bulbaceous: Puzzle Solver...