Hi there
As I do with most of the new websites I come across, I created a login in Twitter when I first heard about it, played around it for a little while and abandoned it. After reading about Twitter’s massive growth and seeing the ecosystem that was breeding around it, I decided to give Twitter a second try in April, this year. I realized that Twitter could be the single integrated news source that I always wanted. I “followed” all the popular news blogs that I read every day and was very impressed with Twitter. Every journalist, blogger and celebrity was on Twitter. It became more than a news source – Twitter “connected” me with these people because it told me what these guys were up to all the time. And I was even able to reply if I wanted to. The 140-character limit for tweets made perfect sense for me. “If a 140-character description (or rather title) cannot impress me, the article is not worth my time”, I thought.
It was all rosy and romantic, like a person who found his perfect soul mate he has been looking for all his life. But then, like any other typical American relationship, this romance didn’t last long. Now, after 6 months into this relationship, I was loitering at TechCrunch when I realized I have lost something – the experience of reading from a blog. These news blogs usually have a beautiful layout with the right font and colors for a good reading experience (although some kill the experience with pop-up and flash advertisements all over), have pictures with each articles, had the most popular articles highlighted and the home pages usually had one or two paragraphs from the article (usually the introduction-to-the-article paragraphs). I realized I read more articles in detail when I am reading from the blog than Twitter. I then realized how important a good user experience is. Twitter has killed the pleasure of reading. I am now slowly “unfollowing” the blogs in Twitter and switching back to scanning the blogs. I will still continue to read Twitter – I have many friends there and I am still interested in knowing what they are thinking and doing. But Twitter will never be my source of news.
Cheers!
