I recently subscribed to the Upcoming feed from Readburner, a site that aggregates items shared by users of Google Reader. I like the feed quite a bit, because even though it repeats some things I’m subscribed to and has a fairly high volume, it puts a number of different voices in my field of vision that I wouldn’t otherwise see.

Today, I saw a post that resonated with me. The source feed was Daily Blog Tips and the post title pretty much tells the story: Twitter Less, Blog More!

I’ll talk more about my ongoing dialectic concerning Twitter in an upcoming post. I think I’m heading in the right direction with it. But here’s what I’ve noticed. As soon as I pulled back from Twitter, my desire to write on this blog increased significantly. I posted five times, including the post announcing my TwitteRetreat, in the first two days of said pullback. I have another post just about written and three more in my head for this weekend, not including this one.

I could easily disseminate those thoughts directly to my Twittersphere. 140 characters and be done with it. And while that has the benefit of immediacy, both in delivery and response, it also misses a huge potential audience. The Feedburner widget in this blog’s sidebar reflects somewhere between 1050 and 1100 subscribers to this blog. Even if we assume a certain number of duplicate subscribers and people who don’t actively read their feeds, I still probably have two to three times the number of active followers of my thoughts here as I do in Twitter (where I have 130). This is partly because of the restrictions I place on my Twitterstream, partly because of the length of time I’ve been dedicated to this space.

And as one might immediately recognize, the 140 character maximum has its limitations on how fully it allows one to develop a thought. Such constraints can be useful. I had a professor who said that you can always say things more clearly with fewer words. Distillation is not a bad thing. But taken too far, you lose the ability to provide context for your ideas. This lends itself to confusion and possible misinterpretation.

Stepping back from Twitter has reminded me of the joy of not being limited, of having a limitless space to call my own. Of course, I could use a good editor, but who couldn’t?