Twitter, Usability
Aug 27, 2009
Todd Zeigler
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Polluting Your Blogs Comment Stream

Techcrunch features an excellent article today that discusses how the integration of Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc. reactions into comment threads on blogs can kill the conversation by dramatically increasing comment volume.  Here is the key point:

Instead, there is endless, pointless repetition; conversations emerge, peter out and then re-emerge 50 comments later with new participants who haven’t noticed that the same issues were discussed 50 comments ago.

I couldn’t agree more.  We experimented with integrating Twitter mentions with our blog comments a few months ago and it made our comment threads incoherent.  If you want to track mentions of your article on Twitter or elsewhere, I think the best practice is to use something like the Tweetmeme button and keep comments completely separate from Twitter reactions. 

  • http://sazbean.com/2009/08/28/internet-marketing-strategy-technology-links-august-28-2009/ Internet Marketing, Strategy & Technology Links – August 28, 2009 | Sazbean

    [...] Polluting Your Blogs Comment Stream (The Bivings Report) [...]

  • http://www.yoomoot.com Nicolas Holzapfel

    I’m glad you liked my article. As I said in it, convenient monitoring of external responses, on sites like Twitter, is actually very helpful for the article author, as I’m experiencing now! But yes, they need to be kept separate. Interesting that you’d tried the Echo-style system already. I wonder if JS-Kit did any such tests with bloggers outside of JS-Kit. I suspect not.

  • http://www.yoomoot.com Nicolas Holzapfel

    I’m glad you liked my article. As I said in it, convenient monitoring of external responses, on sites like Twitter, is actually very helpful for the article author, as I’m experiencing now! But yes, they need to be kept separate. Interesting that you’d tried the Echo-style system already. I wonder if JS-Kit did any such tests with bloggers outside of JS-Kit. I suspect not.

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