DISQUS

alan Jones · 1 year ago

There are some problems with Twitter as a news delivery system.

Unlike a typical newspaper CMS platform, there's no undo and no delete with Twitter - try to edit an incorrect assertion, try to retract an opinion and you'll find you can't.

You can publish a follow-up post, but between Twitter users' attention flitting from one stream to another and Twitter's frequent downtimes, there's a good chance your follow-up post won't be seen, especially at times of high usage.

Unless you change the default preference, all the content you publish on Twitter is republished as a public RSS feed, indexable by search engines and republishable by anyone with an RSS widget. Plan on tweaking that series of twitterings into a pro story later and selling it to a magazine? Good luck: the magazine already has it if they really want it.

You retain the copyright to the content you publish on Twitter, but you have to delete your Twitter profile - and all the associated content with that profile - to remove just one message. Big decision to make after you've built up a following of thousands of users.

If you were to publish something incorrect, and needed to retract it to avoid legal action, you'd have to hope the entity taking the action was satisfied with a follow-up retraction post, since the only way to remove your post from Google would be to delete your entire Twitter account and content, and lose all the hard work and time you'd put into building a following. Not a great choice to make for an up-and-coming news blogger.

Here's my recent post about how Twitter really needs to lift its game on privacy and content management soon.

alan Jones · 1 year ago

...here's a fun game: restrict a Google search to the public Twitter stream and then search on a phrase such as "so horny"... bet the Twitter users in question didn't think about this before they were so open about it!

marcel weiss · 1 year ago

actually you can delete tweets.

mathewi · 1 year ago

Those are all good points, Alan -- and a good reason why Twitter doesn't
replace a CMS, or any kind of regular media outlet for that matter. But it
is an interesting extension to one, I would argue.

mitchjoel · 1 year ago

Great post Matthew. There are moments when I'm not sure who to follow (and who to ignore) in twitter, but I find the more people I follow, the more there tends to be more news coming my way.

David Weinberger had a Blog posting recently about the Accidental Journalist - I think this falls right into that bucket.

mathewi · 1 year ago

Thanks Mitch. There is definitely still plenty of noise, but at the same
time the signal is going up I think -- depending on who you follow :-) And
David's "accidental journalist" is the perfect term for it.

dave · 1 year ago

Another content-free post whose sole purpose is to get you on TechMeme. And btw, some of us like Scoble just the way he is. No need for your to suffer, just unfollow.

mathewi · 1 year ago

Come on, Dave -- you can do better than that.