A relatively new phenomenon on Twitter is being labeled the latest blogging killer.
After blogging for more than 11 years, I’ve honestly lost count of how many times I’ve heard either that blogging is “dead” or that some new trend was certain to kill it.
The Twitter phenomenon known as “screenshorts”  seems to be the latest for the latter category.
Screenshorts are designed to beat Twitter’s ever-annoying 140-character limit. Essentially, screenshorts are screenshots of longer messages. The Next Web has photos of some recent examples including posts from Pink and Justin Bieber.
Of course, all of us who have blogs want to go out and do everything Bieber does!
The site points out that many famous people are using their iPhone Notes app (or similar apps on Droid) to write a long piece, then take a screen shot of that and post to their Twitter account as a “blog post.”
The operative word there are famous people.
There are those who might take the time to read a long tweet from Justin Bieber because he’s Justin Bieber.
There probably aren’t as many Twitter followers who want to read a post that long from you or me.
For anyone who considers Twitter to be blogging, and there’s a good bit of controversy about that, this is certainly an opportunity to post longer pieces. But it seems to me this might be a bigger threat to Twitter than to blogging, since the appeal of Twitter for its users is shorter messages.
I see it as a threat to Twitter only to the extent text “photos”  are a “threat”  to Instagram.
When I sign on there, I want to see photography, photos by amateurs or professionals. I don’t want to “read”  a photo that’s all text over a solid background. Those are the “pictures”  I almost always scroll past without even bothering to read.
I have to wonder how many people on Twitter honestly stop to read those long posts.
But either way, it gives us bloggers one more thing to write about on our blogs, which are definitely not dying.
