Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeD
Twitter is for checking up on what other people are doing and for what is going on in the world at that moment in time (i.e trending). It doesn't feel to me that it's a suitable mechanism for distributing a book, even a short story at that. As a one off stunt for PR, sure. but that doesn't make it any less of a stunt.
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Isn't it always the way of business to take something useful to the average user and turn it into an opportunity to advertise?
Early on (in my history on the web), people had home pages. I remember spending a couple of days link-surfing, just to read all the interesting, goofy stuff people put out there. Then there was the internet boom and so much of the web is really just a huge catalog!
Then people starting keeping blogs. So of course, there are blogs for authors, products, companies, etc.
I've never warmed to Facebook, MySpace, etc., but everyone I knew who had an account talked about it in a way to me that sounded like "blog 2.0" - a more interactive way to talk about yourself and read about your friends' lives. Now, companies want me to "friend" them to get access to discounts, coupons, free reads....WTF?! I'm a "friend" of a company?!
So to hear that companies (authors, etc) are using Twitter to market themselves is no real surprise.
This particular thread topic doesn't interest me, but it's because I don't care for "serial" stories, no matter how they're "published", not because they're "misusing" Twitter.