Are Facebook and Twitter Killing the Blogs?

Are Facebook and Twitter killing off blog comment sections? The number of comments to links to blog posts which I place on  Facebook are now greatly exceeding the number of comments to the original post on the blog. Twitter has certainly replace live blogging.

15 Comments

  1. 1
    Insurance Telemarketing says:

    See, I never really knew about blogs before I knew about Facebook.
     
    And Twitter just likes to kill everything.

  2. 2
    Leslie Parsley says:

    An interesting thought. I’m on FB and Twitter. Rarely go to FB and almost never to Twit. There are just so many ways I want to communicate – at some point they get to be a pain in the neck. I realize that since I’m older, adapting to all the new gadgets can be problematical but I’ve always been in the forefront of technology –  until the last few years.

    But the younger people gravitate to it like it’s the end-all to end-alls. However, I have read that the number of users are slightly dropping for Twit – but who knows for sure.

  3. 3
    Ron Chusid says:

    Naturally this comment on Facebook received multiple responses as compared to one here. The most common reason people gave for commenting on FB as opposed to blogs is the “nutcases” which destroy the comments section. Of course while that is a real problem on many blogs, a tremendous number of blogs (such as here) do use moderation to keep out the trolls.

  4. 4
    Leslie Parsley says:

    I don’t consider FB a blog. Until very recently it was simply a social gathering place – started for university students and has been expanding over the years. The comments people make on the walls have been rather inane for the most part and I basically use it to find out what my children are up to. I know it’s changing and I’ll take a look at LV on it.

  5. 5
    Ron Chusid says:

    Facebook is used in different ways. I actually started my FB page after a wedding in order to share pictures. I thought of uploading them to one of the picture sites but quickly found that the majority of people there had FB pages. FB also provides free picture storage so it was simplest to just place the pictures there. FB also came in handy as a way to upload video and then embed the video here.

    As you experienced, FB can be pretty inane when limited to a handful of friends. It is easy to wind up with comments about what someone is doing for the evening and lots of Farmville stuff.

    I’ve blocked all the obnoxious applications (along with a handful of obnoxious people) and initially became friends with people from blogs and politics who I knew from on line correspondence (and in very rare cases actually meeting). I began to get friend requests from people I didn’t know either in the real world or on line.  I started to have some meaningful discussions of blog-type material on FB but initially it was still limited. Then I began requesting friends of friends to be friends after I realized this was commonly done by those interested in using FB for political talk. The number grew very rapidly as I included people who were involved in discussions on other friends walls and many more invited me to be friends. Now its up to well over 2000 resulting in often having multiple responses to political comments on FB and links to blog posts. Some go through and read the full posts and spread the links to others. (Unfortunately some also comment on the limited quote in the link and miss the full point of the post.)

    I haven’t decided yet if I will branch out into Twitter. There are often links here from other people on Twitter and I’m sure this would increase if I also posted on Twitter myself, but there’s not much time to add on to both FB and the blog.

  6. 6
    Leslie Parsley says:

    Mine is limited to mostly family, which may explain a lot!

  7. 7
    Ron Chusid says:

    When mine was limited to family and friends in the real world as compared to the blogosphere it was relatively quiet. We are also probably in a similar situation where the age of our friends also limits the number who are active on Facebook. In some cases the FB friends are the kids of real world friends but the parents may or may not have a FB page of their own.

  8. 8
    Leslie Parsley says:

    You are prolific. My family is gonna “love” you. Actually I’ve decided they never read anything anyway. Hope this doesn’t go to your FB page. : (

  9. 9
    Ron Chusid says:

    Your family won’t see anything. My FB posts are set by default to be seen by friends only.

    That’s one of the weird things about Facebook compared to a blog. On the blog everyone sees what you see. On Facebook different people coming to your page will see different things.

  10. 10
    Leslie Parsley says:

    There is a beautiful young lady in your photos of friends. Lovely skin. I might be a little partial because both my daughters have red hair.

  11. 11
    Ron Chusid says:

    The photos change so I can’t tell which one you are referring to.

  12. 12
    Mike Hatcher b.t.r.m. says:

    @Leslie-speaking of a beautiful young lady in a facebook photo, I got a facebook invite with a name I didn’t recognize and a picture of a pretty young lady.  After becoming “her friend” I noticed there was no info or posts other then a bunch of guys almost all asking the same question: “Do I know you?”  She had 200 plus friends, all male.  I don’t know what kind of scam was going on, perhaps some computer program to get valid e-mails or something but I dropped “her” as a friend.

  13. 13
    Ron Chusid says:

    I’ve seen two situations of such fake friend requests:

    1) A few weeks ago someone was going through people’s friends lists to quickly add people. In this case it looked legitimate at first as she very quickly had a list of a large number of mutual friends. She used a few names and a few different pictures of beautiful actresses. Her page was promoting a bogus cancer cure.

    2) I’ve had a couple of friends requests from “girls” with no mutual friends which had links claimed to be pictures of the girl off on porn sites.

    There is always the question in such cases as to whether they are also harvesting email addresses or other personal data from “friends” or perhaps have links with viruses. After each of these cases I did run a scan for malware and nothing showed up.

  14. 14
    Mike Hatcher b.t.r.m. says:

    Ah, the old rope them just to advertise to them, a very likely possibility. 

  15. 15
    Mill Messenger says:

    #liberal Are Facebook and Twitter Killing the Blogs? http://url4.eu/1Eg4N

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