Rachael T.'s Profile

Honestly, what's Twitter for? - I joined <a href="http://twitter.com" target="_blank">Twitter</a> a few months ago, and I just do not get what it's for. So far I have seen two types of people:

(1) time-wasters: people who are bored and like browsing Tweets and posting stuff so they can get people to read or respond

(2) promoters: people who have a blog or other service they are trying to get people to look at. these people come in two flavors - the ones that actually post interesting stuff, and then the spammers.

Maybe I'm missing something, but these two use cases don't seem compelling to me. I know people talk about Twitter as a good way to passively share information or communicate with a large group, but why not just use Facebook status messages? Twitter to me, seems more like a feature of a social network that a worthwhile standalone product.

WordPress is the best blogging software in the world - I've been blogging for years, and I have fallen in love with <a href="http://wordpress.org/" target="_blank">WordPress</a>. It's easy to use, it's free, and it's completely <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source" target="_blank">open source</a>. The open source bit is very cool because that means all these developers around the world make very cool plugins and other additions that allow you to do very cool things like track all your users, or easily change how your blog looks. It's also cool because a good portion of WordPress is a non-profit (there is also a for-profit portion called Automatic).

I've also used <a href="http://blogger.com" target="_blank">Blogger</a> (owned by Google) and <a href="http://typepad.com" target="_blank">Typepad</a> but have found them both somewhat less intuitive to use and lacking in many of the cool features of WordPress. Also - this is purely anecdotal - but I found that given similar numbers of inbound links, my WordPress blog did better in Google search results. No idea if this can be substanciated, but thought I'd mention it.