While I'm not proud of it, my blog has been suffering the last few months. Sure, I can blame my work load, my family time, my social life and a multitude of other things but in the end, I'm going to blame Twitter. For those of you that do not know, Twitter is the phenomenal social networking tool that is like a mini-blog and instant messenger mixed together in 140 character chunks. Sounds cool huh? So, if it sounds like something cool, you might be wondering why I'd blame Twitter right?

Well, the truth of the matter is that my blog has always been an information portal. Whenever I would find something new, interesting or anything that I felt would be great to share, I would whip up a blog entry. And since proliferating useful information is the purpose of a blog, this is probably what the rest of you do as well. But now that Twitter is here, I'm having trouble with that blog cycle and it's primarily because of time.

The average blog entry for me is about an hour. I have to create code snippets, cross link, think of useful verbiage to throw in and then craft the blog entry. I can produce the same net effect in Twitter in a few seconds. My personal opinion of why it's so much easier is that Twitter REQUIRES that you break down your message into an easy to consume chunk called a tweet. Since you only have 140 characters for your message, you can only say so much and end up being brief and to the point. The only real time consumer in Twitter is shortening your urls, which most Twitter clients like Tweetie and TweetDeck handle for you or have built-in features for. So either I can spend a minute tops via Twitter or I can go through the whole hour+ it takes for a full-fledged blog entry. What sounds best for an employee, father, husband, entrepreneur, open source developer with little/no extra time? I'll take the easy effort, quick turnaround, global impact approach please: Twitter.

Yes, there are times where a full-fledged blog entry is better suited, like when you want to write an article or blog about something original. In that case, you'll end up writing your entry and then posting a tweet to reach the masses quickly. Reason being is Twitter is viral. You post a tweet and you instantly have alerted N number of people. Your followers, followers of any hashtag you used in you tweet or just people reading the public timeline. You've instantly told the world of your new blog entry. Marketing has never been easier.

In the end, I blame you Twitter for making it so easy to reach so many people and for making the effort required to do so miniscule. And because of this, my blog is suffering. Sure, you've done nothing wrong but in the end, it's much easier for me to blame you instead of myself. Besides, this was a creative way to plug your awesome service.