Some Thoughts on Twitterfeed

Twitter has become an immensely popular…website…(what do you want to call it? Micro-blogging platform?). And it’s also pretty new, so people are still figuring out what works and what doesn’t. I’d like to offer my opinion on one thing: Twitterfeed.

The way Twitterfeed works is that you give it a feed, your username, and your password. Then you fill out a template, and everytime that feed is updated, it’ll post a link in Twitter.

Sounds awesome annoying. Because here’s the thing: People that care about your blog will subscribe to it in an RSS reader, and resent the duplication they receive through Twitter. Also: People who don’t care about your blog won’t want to hear about it in Twitter, and will resent your bombarding of “spam” tweets.

Don’t hang yourself yet, there are three exceptions:

1. If you’re someone like @LinuxJournal, who isn’t a “real person”, but rather an automated way of publication.
2. If you receive a constant amount of new followers. They may not’ve heard of your blog, and a little publicity isn’t a bad thing, right?
3. If, either by the creation of a new feed, or by disabling Twitterfeed and doing this manually, you only link to what you consider to be an exceptional post. People may not care to read all of your posts, but won’t mind reading a few quality ones.

But besides that, I beseech you not to use Twitterfeed, just as common courtesy. Thank you.

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Speaking about Twitter, why not follow me? (What was that line about a little publicity? )