cre8d design

It’s been a year since my guest post on Mashable on 10 Ways Twitter will Change Blog Design in 2009.

Looking back, I was actually pretty spot-on with them all!  Twitter has of course since added lists, which I referred to as TwitterRolls.  The integration of blog and twitter comments, Tweetbacks, was picked up on rapidly by WordPress plugin developers and external tools such as Disqus have taken this a step further, making it easy to use your preferred social networking login when commenting on a blog and even better, pulling in dispersed reactions to your blog posts on other social networking sites.  Twitter has indeed moved right to the top of the ShareThis! tool and many bloggers have ditched general sharing tools for just TweetThis and FacebookThis.  TweetMeme has made tweet stats front and centre of many blogs.  Most bloggers now have some sort of Twitter widget on their site.

So where to next?  Here’s 4* more ways Twitter will continue to change blog designs in 2010:

1. Stop Subscribing, Start Following
   My hunch is that more bloggers will ditch promoting their RSS feed (besides, browsers do a pretty good job of alerting you to them – if you’re a feed reader sort of person).  They’ll focus on getting people to follow their tweets or subscribe to their blog via email.  Of course feeds are still the glue which automatically tweets your latest blog posts and is often used to create the newsletters. Likewise, the number of followers will be more promoted than the number of subscribers.  Facebook’s “Become a fan” popular widget which shows avatars of Facebook fans of the blog and highlighting your own friends will be rivaled by similar ones for Twitter.  (Google’s friend connect widget is another such example.)
2. Most Tweeted Widgets
   A widget for bloggers to show their own most-tweeted posts of all time (or some other time period).  TweetMeme told me last year that it was in the works but I haven’t yet heard back about the status of this. I’m surprised there aren’t more twitter analytics packages in use on blogs.
3. Latest Tweet focus
   More will become a part of a blog’s introduction or header area.  Originally tweets were relegated to blog sidebars, then integrated into the content column.  Just the latest tweet will be displayed, rather than multiple tweets. Maxvoltar is one example of this.
4. Bye Bye Gravatar, Hello the new Gravatar
   Twitter and Facebook avatars will become the de-facto official avatar online, instead of Gravatar.  More blogs will use Twitter and Facebook integrated login systems for their commenters (or switch to a system like Disqus).  As people regularly change their Facebook (and less so, Twitter) avatars, these will be more relevant to display than a hardly-ever-updated Gravatar.

* Because why make a list with a “nice” number if it just means trying to fill a list