The realization that this was the case came over time while increasing my use of Twitter, putting messages out there and watching what came back. I noticed that the people responding were not the people I was following. I expect this is counterintuitive for many new users and likely leads to confusion. The people you follow are often not the people who follow you. Your view of Twitter, the people you see, is not where your updates are being directed.

Contrast this to Facebook, where nearly everyone you "follow" also follows you back. The only way for these two groups to not be the same on Facebook (followers vs. friends you follow) is to use the "hide" features of Facebook to completely block the updates of people in your friends list. From my informal survey this week I found that hardly anyone hides friend updates.

If you really look at who you follow and who follows you on both Twitter and Facebook, for most users it looks something like this:

For Facebook, your updates go out to the same people you are getting updates from. They see your updates and you see theirs. Further, given the ability to comment, "interaction" happens. This is the "social" part that Facebook makes work.

For Twitter, your updates go out to a different group than those whom you are watching. There usually is some overlap but that overlap tends to be less than you think and is effectively minimized even further if you are following any number of the popular and prolific Twitter stars. These users or feeds tend to fill your view of Twitter updates but have a very small percentage of users they follow back.

Twitter is like standing in the middle of a crowded party where everyone faces one way. You get to listen to the people in front of you but only talk to the people behind you.

Take this case of some tech blogger early adopters of Twitter. I wrote a tool this week that goes out and looks at their followers and friends and then compares the two lists to find the overlap. They look like this:

Take the case of Robert Scoble, a popular blogger, a very early adopter of Twitter, and a proponent of "following" as he has discussed in the past. Only 43% of Twitter accounts that Robert follows follow him back. Further, his list of followers is nearly 7 times his list of friends. If you follow him, chances are he is not following you back. This is even more extreme in the cases of Tom Merritt, Leo Laporte, and Molly Wood (some of my favorite webcasters/bloggers) who’s lists of followers are 70, 131 and 185 times bigger, respectively, than their friend lists.

A picture of some of the more average users from my friends and followers that I sampled looks like this:

The conclusion is pretty clear, without a lot of work to push those two circles together, Twitter is not much of a social network. Instead, it is a micro feed service which exhibits some of the characteristics of a social network and in special circumstances can be made to act like one. Twitter is more of a one way fan/feed service where only some limited interaction with your fans or people you are a fan of typically happens. Experienced users are able to hammer this model into some semblance of a social experience, but for many the "social" will be elusive. Understanding this will hopefully help users get what the service is and is not, and allow them to use it for what it does well without getting turned off by missed expectations.

As an experienced author of other types of technical and business content, I had some ideas of my own to start with. After reading up on blogging from some of the experts out on the web, I was able to both validate my own thoughts as well as come up with some excellent additions. I’ve collected these thoughts in the following set of guidelines and based it all on the principle that a blog is a product, and that by treating it like one it will be more likely to succeed.

Here is some of what I ran across while researching this:

• I’d recommend this blogging series on problogger.net. There are some excellent points in that beginner series that I’ve added to my guidelines.
• I really enjoyed this article entitled Blogging Is About Writing on problogger.net authored by Lorelle VanFossen, who also has a blog of her own dedicated to better blogging. Her comments about the concept of writing as a skill being central to blogging really struck a chord with what I was thinking.
• I also wanted to call out this entry from Pat Doyle that talks about blog usability, in particular for the introduction to Browsershots.org. This is a free online tool that will show you your site rendered on a variety of browsers and platforms.

Blogging Guidelines – Version 1.0

The Roadmap (The Plan)

Remember this from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Just like Alice, if you don’t decide where you are going with your blog it won’t really matter what direction you take it and you shouldn’t expect for it to go anywhere in particular. In order to avoid wandering aimlessly make sure you pick a direction and give yourself a roadmap for how you want to proceed. You can always change direction in the future if necessary.

A useful tool to help create the roadmap is to realize that, as I mentioned above, your blog is a product. If you treat it like a product there are plenty of tools and tricks you can use to create an appropriate plan. Here are some basic steps for creating your roadmap:

1. State your problem or opportunity – You need this guidance to frame your vision and focus for your blog.
2. Come up with a vision/mission – This gives you something to go after with your blog and must be tied to addressing your opportunity.
3. Understand your users – Understanding your audience and their goals and desires will help you ensure that your blog talks to the right people.
4. Come up with a plan for building and shipping – With the first three items in place outline your plan for what you are going to write, how often and how you’ll manage what comes next.

The Compass (Guiding Principles)

Once you have the roadmap you can think of these guiding principles as the navigation tips that help you use the map effectively:

• Blogging is writing: This is a key principle and I’ll break it down since there is a lot here that is useful. I’m no expert and have to work at this as well (I had to devote a whole editing run through of this post to commas!) Overall you need to keep in mind that what you are doing in a blog is “writing” and all the traditional rules apply if you want it to be effective:
  • Strunk and White are your friends: If you don’t know who those guys are look them up and get to know them. All writing rules apply – use paragraphs effectively, punctuate appropriately, use proper tense, case, etc.
  • Avoid jargon and acronyms: You taking the extra 1.5 seconds to write out the acronym or explain your technical terms actually saves your readers time and since there are hopefully many more of them than of you that is a good time investment.
  • Less is more: It actually takes more time to express ideas concisely. Take that time.
  • Learn usage of their vs. they’re vs. there, your vs. you’re, than vs. then, affect vs. effect, less vs. fewer, etc.: These are pet peeves for many people. Using them appropriately helps you look like a pro. Grammar Girl can help.

• Be your users: If you did the work in your roadmap to define who your users are you can use user experience design techniques to do some really effective editing. Read through your writing as if you are each distinct user group and make sure you are addressing as much of each of their interests as possible.
• Make content timeless: Content that persists and is useful tomorrow as well as today grows your product value over time. This isn’t always possible and in certain circumstances you may steer away from this principle but make that a conscious decision and make sure it is in line with your vision.
• Use versioned releases: Updates to blog features and structure are a good thing but only when they follow your vision and have minimal/positive impact on your users. Templates and navigation and other features changing constantly is sure to give your users trouble. To avoid this, do what product development teams do and package up changes and feature updates into cohesive manageable sets and roll them out on a reasonable schedule.

That’s all from me for now but since I’m doing this for the exchange of ideas I encourage everyone to post their own tips and best practices for blogging.

What is the roadmap for your blog? What are your guidelines?