One of These Days

It used to be, that if you wanted information on something or someone, you would go to a website about it. Once you arrived, a large number of influencing factors fought for your attention to try and make you stay on the page. The website’s appearance, colour scheme, spacing, vibe; its quality of content, user interface experience, even the domain name, had an affect on the site’s credibility.

Then RSS came along and people started syndicating their content into a single stream. The interface and other usability aspects were handled by your RSS reader, leaving only the content to influence you. This placed the focus on the content. All you had to judge someone by was their words.

Fortunately, however, a person who was publishing content had a lot of words to use. With the advent of twitter, people have just 140 characters to influence someone.

Profile pictures and twitter backgrounds can influence to an extent, but with so many users using a twitter client, the 140 characters is all there is. (perhaps the number of followers you have is also a factor)

How do we write such compelling content in such a confined space? Well, we must write snippets. Lots of them. Single thoughts that, over time, build up to a personality. We can then recommend these personalities to people. Find one person who will listen to you, make them happy, and they will talk about you.

What else can one do?