I’ve been hearing a lot of hubbub about how Twitter will change Blog design and layout in 2009. I personally think that list is already a bit dated but could be a great resource for someone trying to catch up. I want to look forward a little bit and start thinking about how Twitter might better integrate with your wordpress blog to really engage your readers.
First, I do believe you will start seeing twitter handles in comments. My favorite implementation of this so far is Twittar. Twittar actually has the potential to do two things that I think will be big in 2009.
- It will bring us one step closer to centralizing our online representations of ourselves via avatars.
- It will allow people to easily follow not only the author of a great blog post, but it’s commenters as well.
Twittar is only starting to scratch the surface of bringing our Twitter identities to the blogosphere.
Another thing I believe will start happening is the usage of the Twitters API to optimize “Popular Posts” and “Suggested Posts”. These lists are traditionally generated off the number of comments, tags, page views, etc. However, what if you also generated these lists based on the number of retweets it got. Twitter is providing valuable information about how readers enjoy our content and it’s about time we start using that data for functional purposes rather than just looking at it in pretty graphs.
The last thing I believe will start to pick up in ’09’ is the ability for our blogs to Tweet. No I am not talking about Twitter Feed. I am talking about using Twitter’s API to:
- Thank commenters
- Allow users to @reply you from your blog
- Display your most active followers
- Display your retweets
- and the list goes on
Conclusion
Twitter has provided us with more than enough tools to start coming up with fresher ways to engage each other. I think part of moving forward is to talk about the possibilities. Conversation encourages innovation.