Gestalt therapy


Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang and influential blogger Mathew Ingram both noted that Twitter.com has become a big referrer of traffic to their blogs.

I had noticed that same trend on this very own blog, but thought that it was an effect warped by the small amount of traffic I have. But Owyang and Ingram are well-trafficked blogs. So it’s a trend worth watching. For this site, Twitter.com  is up to No. 5 in referrers, surpassed only by Google, Google images, a Knoxville site that is linking to one post, and direct traffic, according to Google Analytics.

Says Owyang:

Twitter is one of the top referrers of traffic to my blog, over 2000 referrers from twitter to my blog in the last 30 days…there’s something happening there.

Says Ingram:

Not only that, but when I scroll through the status updates from my Facebook friends, a surprising number of them say that so-and-so “is twittering…” and then what their message is.

Ingram, like I and many others, has his blog RSS feed tied to Twitter updates tied to Facebook status updates in a sort of Echo Web.
Some have Tumblr tied into this too in a life stream.

Not drinking the Kool-Aid is the ever-thoughtful Scott Karp, who posted on Twitterphoria Tuesday “Why I Stopped Using Twitter.” Karp laments that he’s kicked the Twitter habit because, well, the crack just wasn’t good enough anymore. But it is still the best tech crack on the street and the only escape was to go cold turkey.

He makes lots of good points, keys the architects of social network software might want to pocket.

Twitter is hard to explain to non-users, but Karp came up with a vivid one:

Twitter has turned distraction into an art form. It’s like hanging out at a bar with a bunch of interesting people (some of whom are talking on their cellphones) and forgetting that you have to go home.

The whole connections between social networks thing got Susan Mernit to describe how she tiers LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, which is fascinating. I don’t have them in such neat boxes, but, hey, have you seen my desk?

Course, Ryan Sholin figured it out when the whole twitter-rattle-tattle led him to Do You Know Clarence, whose social network epiphany is: “Quite simply, my whole hustle is that, ‘I do me’.”

And with that insight into connectedness, consider adding me to your Twitter friends. LinkedIn contacts, Facebook friends and blog reader, my friends.