On 12/14/2011 1:00 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
If D wants a twit feed and a link to it or whatever, then whatever. I just don't think prominent corporate branding is appropriate on the frontpage unless it's something directly connected (Digital Mars would be appropriate, for example). Any other complaints I have about social networking or whatever else aren't really about spreading word of D anyway, but rather spreading word of sensible software design.
I dismissed twitter as a meaningless fad for years (starting with the ridiculous name). But a friend of mine, Roy Osherove, went to some pains to show me how wrong I was, and how valuable a tool twitter was. He was actually able to organize an impromptu "flash conference" in London in two days using nothing but twitter. The conference was a big success, and I was sold.
Twitter has an endearing property - people sign up to get your tweets, so you are not spamming them. It used to be that a mailing list, then an email list, were valuable business property. Now it's the number of followers you have on twitter.
Since then, I have found that twitter is, hands down, the most effective way of reaching people interested in D and keeping them interested.
Twitter works well on small, mobile devices while email is just a giant pain on the small screen.
Having the twitter feed for d_programming on the home page is a nice thing so the "what's new" is constantly refreshed. We don't have to write any code to do it, or reinvent (badly) what twitter does, and it costs nothing. I don't mind it saying "twitter" under the feed. We also use Google's translate widget.
