PLoS - on Twitter and FriendFeed

Despite online debates - which one is better: Twitter or FriendFeed, sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek - the fact is that these are two different animals altogether. Asking one to make a choice between the two is like asking one to make a choice between e-mail and YouTube - those are two different services that do different things. Thus, they are to be used differently.

Twitter is a communications tool (or a 'human application'). You can broadcast (one-to-many), you can eavesdrop (many-to-one) or you can converse (one-to-one, either in public or through Direct Messages). But most importantly - you have to mix a little bit of all three. If all you do is throw your RSS feed into Twitter, i.e., only broadcast, then you are doing it wrong. In Twitter, you have to engage with others on a regular basis - listening, talking, conversing. Reciprocating. Not building a fan-club, but a network of friends. As I mentioned yesterday:

You will be measured by the size of your network - who is your (mutual - it has to be mutual!) friend.

You know that, after a long time of resistance, I recently succumbed and started using Twitter - find me here. I find it useful and I am trying to balance the three modes (broadcast, eavesdrop, converse) as best I can. I can definitely see the allure, especially for people who use mobile devices (I don't - I spend too much time online anyway and need to reconnect with the physicalness of the world when I am not at the computer, thus I disabled the online access on my cell phone and have never texted a message in my life).

People who follow me on Twitter, probably all of them, know where I work. One out of 20 tweets or so have something to do with PLoS. My profile links to my blog, on which it is immediately obvious where I work. I don't need to pull in the RSS feed from PLoS to be effective as a "face of PLoS" on Twitter.

But, even better, I am not alone - Liz Allen is now on Twitter, too, as an "official" face of PLoS. And, if you check out the PLoS twitter profile and click on "Follow", you will see that she totally groks it. Her tweets do not have that horrible "PR feel" about them that some of the business marketers erroneously use. So I hope you will subscribe.

FriendFeed, on the other hand, is an aggregator. It is as much or as little of a conversation as you want it to be. You do not have to balance the three modes and you can use it in one of the modes only and it can still work for you.

I have joined FriendFeed some time ago and I find it extremely useful. This is where I find half of my "bloggable" material these days - the eavesdropping mode. I do the broadcast mode by importing the feeds from my blog and my Twitter. I use the conversation mode by "liking" and/or commenting on other people's stuff. As with Twitter, people who follow me mostly know where I work and are used to seeing an occasional PLoS-related entry from me without considering it to be PR spamming.

But what FriendFeed allows me to do in addition, is make a room. You can join the room or not, depending on your interest. But this way I do not have to spam anyone who subscribes to my main feed. You can join the PLoS ONE room if you want to see the PLoS ONE feed imported. Whenever there is a good blog post covering one of the PLoS ONE papers, I add the permalink to that post as a comment on that paper's feed in the room (feel free to do it yourself if you blog about our papers). Occasionally I may place additional news or links there as well. That way, I can be myself yet still do the marketing for PLoS that I need to do. And nobody's complained so far. You should give it a try.