Over the years Musings For A Darkened Room has taken on many shapes. It’s main focus in 2007 was to act as a personal hub for thoughts, musings and other rants about anything and everything.  But as I began blogging more I found that I was focusing on the SEO industry and Social Media industries more, and randomly peppered the blog with other random posts about a potpourri of topics I enjoyed.

As my SEO and Social Media career has advanced and I have become more involved in the industry as a whole, built up relationships, and developed a network of followers and friends I feel that it is time to serve them best with a dedicated search and social platform that isn’t a hybrid of all of my other interests.  In the coming months I will be revealing a new project that is aimed solely at search and social media, and will feature more frequent updates on all things search and social.

At that time Musings For A Darkened Room will revert back to it’s original incarnation as a personal blog with a variety of subjects to be covered.  I can guarantee you’ll get some music posts, green living posts, possibly a few Twilight related posts and a number of other personal anecdotes and musings that are always floating around in my head.  For my search and social followers, I will update this blog with information on the new project as soon as it launches so that if you wish to update your feeds with the SEO and social media specific blog you can.

I appreciate all of my readers, and I thank all of you for the good times and interactions we have had over the years and I hope that many of you will continue to read Musings For A Darkened Room and become more familiar with the personal side of my life.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or GTalk probably know by now that Friday afternoon I lost all of my Twitter followers and everyone I was following. For those of you who didn’t know, let me fill you in:

Mid afternoon on Friday I noticed that I had gone tweetless for quite some time. Upon further investigation I discovered that my follower and following number were both set at 0; a scary realization for someone who had nearly 650 followers and was following over 800 tweeple. After navigating through the terrible, terrible, support system used by Twitter I finally figured out how to report my concern via commenting on the “known issue”. After my post and a number of other user posts Twitter admitted there was a problem and at 3:00 pm PST and advised users that they had a fix and it would be resolved today.

It is now 8:32pm PST and my account, and from what I can tell in the Twitter support thread, a number of other accounts are still without any followers and are unable to follow anyone. That’s over 72 hours without a resolve, which has left me crippled in terms of spreading blog posts, information, and interacting with fellow twitter users.

Earlier this morning I had a brief discussion with some of my fellow SEO Dojo members about the issue, and one member in particular, Justin Parks, made an interesting comment; “I don’t think anyone should complain, free is free after all.”. It got me thinking; in one hand he was right. I pay absolutely nothing to help keep Twitter afloat, what right do I have to complain that it has been nearly 72 hours and I’ve been without service. On the other hand, Twitter provides a service to the public. Free or not I feel it is in some way their obligation to try and support their customer base as much as possible; if not for the users alone, at least out of good business sense.

Since my post in the thread Friday afternoon at least 30 other twitter users have complained of the same problem I am experiencing, and no further updates regarding an ETA or status of the issue have been made by Twitter their post on Friday.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think free services like Twitter have an obligation to support their customers better than they are currently, or is Justin correct in the sense that if we aren’t paying for it we should just deal? Let me know what you think in the poll below. I may be doing a follow up post once service is restored and I’ll use the data collected.

So I’ve been throwing this idea around in my head in regards to my Google Reader and how long it takes me to get through each day. I have 219 subscriptions in my reader covering topics from SEO and Social Media to Graphics Design and Writing. The idea I had was having my peers, Twitter followers, and readers pick my Google Reader subscriptions.

The idea itself still excites me and I think it could be awesome if executed properly, but the execution is what I’m having trouble with. How do I filter out blogs people are just throwing at me to get a link on my blog? How do I choose the maximum number of blogs I want to have? I still want to keep a diverse list of blogs on my favorite subjects, but I want to cut it down to the best of the best. Finally how can I get my peers, followers, and readers to chime in on it? Do list off all 219 blogs and let people pick through them or do I have people suggest their favorite blogs and take the top picked blogs out of the bunch?

So this is where I need your help. Is my idea completely insane or do you think it could be executed if done correctly? I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas and if I use your idea I’ll be sure to give you some love if/when the project comes full circle.