Trying Something New with Twitter

The explosion of interest in Twitter, Facebook, Pownce, et al is exciting for anyone hoping to get their message out, but it also poses some obvious problems:

1. Multiple channels mean multiple places to post (and check). Blogging is a dangerous time suck as it is.
2. Even if you automate the cross-posting -- and God help me if I ever go so far as to do this -- that means the same posts are showing up on your blog AND Twitter AND Facebook AND [insert your preferred Web2.0 services here]...

Granted, point #2 might make me feel good about my Technorati rankings, and as Scott Karp quipped, I could always think of it as 360-degree marketing. But mainly, it strikes me as a very good way of driving my handful of regular readers/followers up the wall rather quickly.

So with all that in mind, I'm trying a platform experiment of my own. I'm now using Twitterfeed to send this blog's RSS feed to Twitter.com/TroySchneider -- but only for those blog posts I've tagged with "Twitter."

So while that tag can now mean either "this is about Twitter," or "this is something I just want to post via Twitter," it at least means the little Twitter window on this blog won't be completely circular. And since this site's main RSS feed only includes items that get promoted to the front page, I syndicate a post only via Twitter if the need arises. (This one, however, is going everywhere -- sorry for anyone who visits the blog, Twitter and Facebook.)

So we'll see if being choosy about publishing channels is worth the trouble -- or if people who are just "flooding the zone" have the right idea.