Blogs vs Twitter

My friend Tynan was telling me the other day that he has a policy against reading people's blogs. Interestingly to me, he loves following people through Twitter. I was wondering why this was. The main explicit difference between the two is that Twitter limits entries to 140 characters, but I don't think that's the entire story.

I think that though between the two of them, though both are completely visible to the public, Twitter seems to many more like a conversation with friends akin to text messaging, and blogging feels more like publishing to the world, despite the fact that most blogs are written as journals and only read by close friends. If anyone. I mean, I have no idea if anyone pays any attention to this blog here.

But that does make me wonder about what will come next. We've got status updates on facebook blending in to status updates on IM services, blending into Twitter posts and blogs posts, and it's only going to keep becoming more fine shades of gray. Maybe we need a better map of who's reading what. If we could note the social networking pages people visit, the people people are following on Twitter, what blogs people read, what music and tv shows people are watching and then combine all that...

Well, I'm not sure that deals with the original question about the distinction between blogs and twitter at all. It's probably just feeding my desire to collect and analyze lots of social information. But it would shed light on the flow of information and communication in our society.