Twitter, FriendFeed, Who Cares?

About a year ago, Twitter was all the rage. Several people were saying "Twitter is the best way to promote your blog!" I briefly looked at it and concluded "Why bother?"

Twitter had some serious performance issues. It couldn't handle the load of its user base. Twitter is losing users.

Now, FriendFeed is the "trendy" thing. It's like Twitter, but better.

Several people were complaining about discussions on FriendFeed. If your blog post is loaded into FriendFeed via RSS, then comments appear on FriendFeed and not the original blog. That's good if you feel the blogger is being a ****head, such as my criticism of pro-State trolls. It's bad, because the comments are now owned by FriendFeed and not the original blog.

Does it pay for me to directly promote my blog on FriendFeed or other social networking websites? My guess is "no". Why should I bother to promote FriendFeed? In another year or two, another service will be "trendy". Of course, I'm promoting Blogger just by hosting my blog here. Someday, I may switch to self-hosting.

Other people sometimes promote my blog, which is more effective than promoting it myself.

Maintaining a blog is enough work. If I use multiple sites, I'm diluting my effort instead of reinforcing it. The best philosophy is "If you write good posts, then you'll get visitors." Besides, it's easy enough to import my content elsewhere via RSS. Even though I've been actively commenting on mises.org lately, it's still only a small slice of my overall traffic.

If there's an interesting discussion of my blog on another site, let me know! I usually find them via Google search and Technorati, but I don't see all of them. Some forum engines don't expose their content to Google search.