Twitter and Facebook are killing blogs.
Twitter and Facebook are on their way to killing personal blogs.
Keith Rabois, vice president of strategy and business development for Slide
, the social entertainment company wrote an interesting anaylsis on why Facebook, MySpace and YouTube killed eBay.
Let’s rewind to 2004, just a short five years ago. In January 2004, almost 50 percent of the entire U.S. Internet population visited eBay each month. If people were bored at work, chances are they were surfing the pages of eBay and unearthing eccentric auction items they never even knew existed. This was the height of the eBay heyday.
I can tell from personal experience, that Twitter and Facebook is on the way toward killing personal blogs.
I have one personal blog and one hobby blog.
My blogrolls are getting smaller and smaller as I delete the blogs that haven't updated in the past month. It's brutal because I enjoyed reading a wide variety of personal bloggers, from Mommy Bloggers to Boomer Bloggers to Xer Bloggers.
It's not easy to blog on a regular basis. If I had a nickel for every blogger apology for not writing, or claiming blogger's block I could afford to bailout Chrysler myself.
One of my favorite writers about blogging is Lorelle Von Fosen of Lorelle on WordPress. She's writing a series now for Blog Herald about "I Have No Idea What I'm Going To Blog About." She was motivated because she has seen too many titles like:
- Nothing Happened Today
- I Don’t Have Anything to Say
- Not Much, You?
- Been a While
- Sorry, I Haven’t Been Around Much Lately
- Distracted
- What should I say next?
- I have to write something here
I wish her well, but I have serious doubts that personal blogs will be as popular as they once were.There was a natural ebb and flow of bloggers as blogs get started then abandoned after one post or a month of posts. Technorati, a website that attempts to index the blogosphere says blogs are still growing, but at a much slower pace.
One of the top marketing bloggers, Seth Godin, has this to say:
“The word blog is irrelevant, what's important is that it is now common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they share what they care about with the world.”
Another top blogger and outspoken blogger, Chris Pirllo adds his support of blogging continuing to be a force.
“The idea of blogging will never disappear, but the process by content is created for one blog or a series of blogs will continue to undergo radical upheavals. This past year, we saw the introduction of countless "microblogging" platforms, to the point where they (themselves) have become a commodity —further pushing individual voices to the Blogosphere’s melting pot.
But these two bloggers fall in the A list category, having tens of thousands of subscribers and readers. When they speak the blogosphere listens and responds. More importantly, the blogosphere picks up their thinking and reinforces their position on the A list.
But for D listers, blogging can be a long, arduous, task with little reward. Despite the quality of writing, building an audience and generating comments can be frustrating. D list bloggers write because the love to write. These are the bloggers that are moving to Facebook and to Twitter.
Facebook and Twitter are just so much easier. Twitter limits your tweets to 140 characters, and Facebook is loaded with apps to provide more fun than blogging memes.
Neither requires much thought and other users don't expect much in the way of grammar and spelling. As a matter of fact Twitter encourages SMS talk.
So writers condense their thoughts into snippets and publish a higher volume of posts, often at the sacrifice of quality.
But Twitter and Facebook are fun. If a blogger is writing for fun, the allure of Twitter and Facebook is obvious. Getting a huge following is often just a matter of asking.
Twitter and Facebook may not kill blogging, but within the next three years, the number of small blogs will peak and then fall.
Comments
Step above the fray and you see a bigger trend: People using social tools to create and manage an online presence. We have to stop following the flavor-of-the-month tool and start looking at the many ways companies, self-employed individuals, and just plain folks can use ALL the online tools to enhance their lives and achieve their personal and business goals. We all have micro-audiences we can build for our great benefit. THAT is the future.
I like to look at Twitter as an opportunity to enhance blogging in which a headline is posted as well as a link to the blog. Heck, we have Twitwall that posts directly to Twitter and it's a blog.
Well, I am on both twitter and facebook. And I am a blogger, blogging every day....and will keep on blogging :-)
I respectfully disagree, Mark. I'm on Facebook, on Twitter, and I also have been blogging since 2007. I believe there will be an eventual backlash to the shallowness of Twitter and the vastness of Facebook and blogs will again be as popular as they were. Twitter and FB can enhance the blogging experience, but I doubt they will ever replace it. Just my humble opinion. Interesting post -- thank you.
@Snow: I hope you are right, but months later see the trend toward Facebook growing.
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