Facebook, Twitter, and Blogging - the right data in the right place

I spent 5 days in Flagstaff last week, and had a very enjoyable time. I did some blogging about it, but for whatever reason, blogger doesn't seem to work really well on my Mac laptop, and I'm not sure why. I'm still trying to learn its quirks and differences from Windows.

Blog problems aside, you think I might have sent out E-mails to folks, but I'm not interested in using up a lot of bandwidth, and I don't think people read E-mail much anyway anymore, between spam and mostly unwanted newsletters. I've been blogging here for a long time, as many of my online friends have, and I appreciate them for it, because it's an easier way to keep up with what they're doing and saves me space in my Inbox for other items.

Some have commented to me in other places about my writing on here being "verbose". That's true. I don't post shorter news items or commentary simply because I have no desire to be a journalist with an agenda. (I just have an agenda.)

While you might not see those shorter things here, instead of E-mailing out jokes, news stories, or other similar things, for now, I've decided to try using Twitter as a substitute for that. It's not pushing what I think is important into your inbox - you can decide to read it if you want.

The whole "what are you doing" concept of Twitter is simply irritating by itself. If you're going to tell me about what you're having for dinner or what time your plane landed, do it somewhere else. If I'm relatively bored, I may choose to do it on Facebook which is full of all kinds of self-indulgent silliness and time-wasting fun anyway.

And, sorry, but I'm not going to get those updates on my cellphone. That has a ridiculous impact on productivity if you're willing to allow yourself to be interrupted by text messages of what all of your various friends and acquaintances are doing each minute. I love you, but I'll catch up with your tweets later, thanks.

One has to be aware of the transience of these types of communication media and the importance of the data that's being stored in the respective places - both because of privacy and because of the value of the data itself. Of course, Facebook and Twitter (and Blogger, I'm sure) will go out of style, but I'm paying attention to what types of information I'm putting in there. Facebook material is either fluff or standard profile stuff which I can mostly rattle off anyway in an instant on any social site. Twitter updates are probably only interesting for about 2 weeks, at the very most, so if they vanish, it's no great loss. I do care about what I write here, and I can export that and back it up locally if I need to.

Let me know what you all think of this use for Twitter, or if any of you know of some better way to do this (that is getting social traction so it's not completely unfamiliar to people).