I have found recently that I am using LiveJournal a lot less than I used to. I just don’t feel any motivation to keep it updated in the same way for example that I update my Twitter.
Twitter is (for those of you who don’t know) a “microblogging” service, where the user is encouraged to make frequent updates in a number of ways. I think this is what has kept me interested in the service. Another benefit of Twitter is that it can send text messages to you with your friends updates. This has been very useful for me whilst I’ve been staying at my Dads place in Bristol as he doesn’t yet have the internet. (Yes, it does kill me to be offline for so long. And yes, my phone bill this month was double what it normally is because I was checking things on my phone
There are other tools that take your updates from Twitter and do something else with them – for example, I have LoudTwitter linked to my LiveJournal which aggregates all posts in a 24 hour period and posts them into LJ. This works well I think, it keeps everything in one place, and allows people who may not know about Twitter to keep updated with my posts. And I feel better because it feels like I’m actually keeping the LJ updated.
I think that I am going to be using the WordPress installation as a place to make longer posts such as these, and then the LiveJournal can be kept to link everything together. I don’t want to just delete my LJ as I have been using it since April 2001 (my five year post can be found here) and I still read a lot of friends things on there.
Microblogging is becoming quite a popular way of letting people know little snippets of your life online – particularly with the introduction of “status updates” on Facebook, and more recently MySpace. Because it is so easy to send this information out to your friends, it can cause problems if you don’t think about what you are writing – I remember last year where someone at work had put on their Facebook that they were so wasted on a Thursday night…the next morning, they called in with car troubles and expected to be late. It may have been some coincidence, but it didn’t look too good! Always think about who can read what you’re publishing – something I have gone by since putting anything online (late 2000) and haven’t had any problems so far.