On Anil’s piece titled If You Didn’t Blog It, It Didn’t Happen, I left the following comment:
Twitter is like going to a restaurant. Blogging is like buying a house.
I thought I should expand on that… and what better place than right here, on my own blog, where I’m allowed to.
As I’ve said before (in fact, I said it just yesterday) there are things I don’t like about Twitter, but my not liking these things, or complaining about them probably isn’t going to change them. That’s OK… I don’t own Twitter, I don’t control Twitter, I just visit Twitter.
Twitter is like going to a restaurant. You can talk to people you know, and people you don’t know. They can talk to you. You can overhear conversations. You’re at the mercy of the management. They can kick you out.
Blogging is like buying a house. It requires maintenance and upkeep. You’re free to do what you want, you can redecorate, or hang some pictures, or ramble on as long as you want. It’s your home, you own it, and you make the rules.
Anyway, that’s how I see it. I’ve had this blog since 1997. I’ve been using Twitter since 2006. I can still get to every single blog post I’ve written here (and so can you) while Twitter only lets me see a portion of the content I’ve put into it. I’ve started archiving as much of it as I can over here… on my own site, because I don’t trust Twitter with my data the way I trust myself with my data.
