cre8d design

Earlier this week, musician John Mayer closed down his Twitter account with millions of followers to focus on his Tumblr blog named “One forty plus”, a not-so-subtle reference to the maximum length of a tweet.

Of his decision he wrote:

“I had 3.3 million Twitter (Twitter) followers back in March April when I announced that I’d be predominantly posting on Tumblr, a site that takes all of 25 seconds to sign up for. Five months later I have just passed 50,000 followers, a fraction of my Twitter base… I will leave the opining up to you, but I think I made the right move.”

While many speculate why someone would shut down their Twitter account when they could still focus on blogging and, say, just auto-tweet new blog posts to a massive audience, I want to focus more on something I’ve been noticing as of late: a renaissance to blogging from those who have been hooked on Twitter.

At the recent New Zealand Wordcamp conference, I heard Courtney Lambert refer to your blog/website as your “official channel” and the phrase resonated with me.

It’s all very well to have a Twitter account, Facebook fan page, LinkedIn profile etc (or whatever the next big buzz is) and be connected with lots of people, but there’s always an underlying usefulness and need for a central place which is easy to access, find via search engines and search internally for archives (not easily done with Twitter or Facebook) for an audit/record of things said in the past. A site you are in complete control of and can point people through to whenever you need to say something a bit more than 140 characters.

It’s been fascinating to see more and more of my friends and those I follow on Twitter taking up blogging – the desire to communicate publicly and with more freedom than is offered in Twitter and Facebook reminds me of the importance of blogging, even though it’s been around so much longer than the other two.

Perhaps this is what John Mayer has been discovering.