Blogging is Dead! Long Live Blogging! Why I'm Twining Instead of Blogging.

I love how my friend, Jason Calacanis, announces the death of blogging and his retirement from blogging...on a blog. He's a genius. You can read more here and here.

But as anyone who reads this blog knows, I try to be ahead of the curve. In keeping with that, I announced something similar last week. Sorry Jason, I beat you to it. 

Unlike Jason, however, I haven't left blogging. Instead, my blogging has evolved and is moving into a better medium. Jason wants to go back to old fashioned email mailing lists, but I'm moving forward into something even better than blogs.

Blogs will continue of course, but for those of us who do a lot of blogging and online bookmarking, social networking, online discussions, and social media sharing -- blogs just aren't productive enough anymore. Neither are social networks or the other tools available today. Because of that, I believe that an increasing amount of activity is going to move off of today's blogs and into a new kind of social media environment. I call these next generation services, interest networks, and my company is building one of the first: Twine.

Interest networking is, I believe, the next evolution of social media. The next step after blogs, aggregators, personal home pages, and social networks. It brings them all together into a new synthesis that is finally what we all really were trying to achieve with all those separate tools in the first place. Interest networks are a big step towards a more unified, productive, and manageable social media environment.

I still blog here from time to time, but it's just a fraction of the online authoring and conversations I participate in now -- instead, the vast majority of my social media activity is taking place in Twine. I'm Twining a lot more than I'm blogging or participating in social networking -- probably by a factor of 100X.

Why have I been doing so much more Twining than blogging and social networking? First of all, I'm not interested in having a conversation with the entire general public, or ever being an A-List blogger, or interacting with networks of random strangers. What I want is to efficiently participate in many different specific groups and communities around particular interests and relationships I have.

Some of my interest communities are relevant to each other but many are not, and it would not make sense to combine them all into one blog or network (which is what present-day blogs and social networks require). In Twine it's super easy to create the equivalent of microblogs, microcommunities, and micronetworks, or to join and participate in, existing ones started by others, around any person, group or interest.

Some of my interest communities are public and many are private (for teams, for private discussions, etc). But I don't want to have to run many blogs or networks for all these different communities I want to converse with -- that's just too much work. Instead, in Twine it is extremely easy to do everything I need to do in one place.

In Twine I can create, join and converse with a large number of different individuals, groups and communities around particular interests, goals, activities and relationships I have. Many of my Twine interactions are public but some are private. They are not all structured or governed in the same way. Twine helps me manage them all, and participate efficiently to author content, track what others are saying, as well as to share and distribute my ideas, participate in discussions, and discover new things around my interests. That's what Twine was built to for.

Twine enables me to connect with others around my interests, the way I really want to. It's easier and smarter than blogging or other forms of social media. Of course, it's still a work in progress; we're still in beta and it's not perfect or even fully built yet. But it's getting there.

Twine has been making great headway in inventing and defining what interest networks should be like. Soon we are going to start opening Twine up to the wider Web. Very soon in fact. And then, as we move into the fall and winter release timeframes, we are going to be rolling out some important new capablities that may be very disruptive. Stay tuned. There are going to be a series of cool things happening in Twine during the remainder of this summer, and this year.

I agree with Jason -- blogging isn't good enough. The first wave of social media is ending -- for some because they couldn't cope with the overload, for others because they want a better medium. I believe interest networks are what's next and I hope to make Twine into the best place to network around interests on the Web. So don't give up blogging or move to email lists, Jason. Just move to a better platform. See you in Twine!

By the way, you can respond to this post in Twine, here. (I'm turning off comments on all new articles in this blog. If you want to have a real discussion with me and others, it's easier in Twine, so my discussions will be there from now on.)

And please join the FriendFeed room about Twine if you are there too.