Users would be interested in: Significant application & theme updates, new *useable* applications & themes, major news from the developers Developers are interested in: Development shifts, Programming articles, Experimental projects, Research articles, etc.
Most developers will be following the user stream, so there's no reason to duplicate the information in their stream.
Each item is essentially going to be an article. These articles need to reside somewhere, either a blog, the wiki, or a custom news app. The enlightenment site has a news feed, but it's fairly simplistic. It would be nice to have something that can separate the streams (announcements, users, developers) and tag articles. The wiki could potentially be used, but wiki's are not particularly good at storing transient articles nor tagging them. These articles are useful for a year maybe, but in time they become obsolete. A blog system really makes the most sense to me.
Once you have a blog application, I don't see the need for Twitter. Essentially, each tweet is like the RSS summary to an article that you're going to link to in the tweet. Just following the RSS feed of the blog has the same effect. The only benefit I see to twitter is in knowing how many followers you have. But you could just use web analytics software on your blog application if you're really interested in this.
As far as the Twitter "pros". Articles will always need a short effective summary, this is usually less than 140 characters anyway, not because the author was limited to some arbitrary number of characters, but because the purpose of the summary is to be a short sentence that tells readers what is in the article. Looking at edevel on Twitter, there is a lack of professionalism. There are too many tweets that I'm not interested in and many tweets seem more conversational than informative. Although greater accessibility is generally a good thing, being able to update the articles from a mobile phone will probably lead to lower quality journalism than you would otherwise have.
Last I want to compare some information feeds. Here's the current edevel twitter feed and a few other project feeds I follow:
http://twitter.com/edevel http://blog.songbirdnest.com/ http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/ http://dojotoolkit.org/taxonomy/term/29/0Notice that the twitter feed more resembles mailing lists than a good source of news and articles. You'll notice that the songbird site has a twitter feed on the right side, which also seems more like a conversation between people than a source of news articles.
Maybe the difference is just in the granularity of detail. At the most verbose level you have IRC and the mailing lists. Some people follow these sources and highlight things on twitter. Other people will follow any of the three sources and then write higher quality articles on the blog or create wiki pages summarizing changes. Other articles will come from developers who want to summarize and publish their work.
So I'll just conclude by saying that for me and other users/developers who want to follow the big events in the enlightenment world Twitter doesn't seem to be the right tool. It shares the problems IRC and the mailing lists have of having too much information flyby. I would prefer to follow a source that has a few high quality articles and news updates a week. Not something like twitter with 10 tweets a day. I don't think there's anything wrong with using Twitter as an additional communication tool. I just think that what you really want is a better blog with more authors.
If no one has the energy/time to compare blog application tools and install one on the website I would be interested in doing so. Just tell me if you want me to look into it.
-Arlo Michael Jennings wrote:
On Wednesday, 13 May 2009, at 13:38:30 (+0200), Thomas Gst?dtner wrote:Why waste time and ressources for such a useless service that doesn't have any advantage over anything else, instead of maintaining a official information source on e.org with 1) no 140 char limit 2) more professionalism 3) a more official character 4) a proper standard to get the news (RSS) 5) far better usability. I really can't understand why every new hype has to be adopted while the official sources are hardly maintained at all.1. The 140-character limit is fairly soft, and it keeps things to digestible chunks with links to the details. 2. If you think there is a lack of professionals on Twitter, you clearly haven't used it. 3. It would be as official as we made it. 4. Twitter also has an RSS feed. Your point? 5. Twitter can be updated via SMS, countless phone-based applications, the web, and (IIRC) e-mail. How, exactly, is that less "usable" than the E web site? Michael
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