Comments on: Random Thoughts on Twitter

By: Jaime Macias

Jaime Macias — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:27:15 +0000

I'm going to make a point to Tweet the entire text of Ulysses between now and the end of time 140 characters at a time. When I'm done I will take those tweets, compile, and print them out.

By: Jaime Macias

Jaime Macias — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:27:15 +0000

I'm going to make a point to Tweet the entire text of Ulysses between now and the end of time 140 characters at a time. When I'm done I will take those tweets, compile, and print them out.

By: lhl

lhl — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 01:51:08 +0000

Good point, Twitter by virtue of brevity I think does actually tend toward IRC even though it's has some more publishy aspects and is async and not realtime, but that idea of off the cuff conversation vs more well thought out compositions I think is pretty valid.

So, these days my blog tends toward the expository, but mostly because the rest of it has been offloaded into various tools (flickr, delicious, twitter, facebook, etc). I'm not sure there's a mapping since they're quite different, but I use to spend a lot more time gathering and curating links - which I don't think that was necessarily less worthwhile, but I'm not sure there's a conversion factor.

So, I don't think I'd print my tweets into a hardback, but I could see myself reading some and it being really interesting. I do think there are lots of great tweets. (I'm a big fan of favoriting stuff in general) You can see some of my favorite tweets...

Oh, neither here nor there, but Ulysses tweeted, and If Homer's Odyssey Was Written On Twitter. :)

Also, I can laugh (well, snigger) at the wall joke too, but imagine if you were at a cafe w/ your friends and there was a TOS agreement that claimed ownership over your conversation in there. The objections you'd have wouldn't have anything to do w/ the artistic value of the conversations themselves...

By: bertrandom

bertrandom — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:29:31 +0000

If you had a dollar for every time someone tells you they don't "get" Twitter, you'd be making money in a very strange way.

I didn't "get" IRC back in 1996. I got bored one night a few years ago and took out a CD that was an archive of tape backups. Let me break the down that format shift for you, because I think it's a nice juxtaposition - I tape backed up a Quantum Bigfoot drive into 10 250MB Colorado Tapes and then a few years later I burned those on to CDRs in batches of 3 because I knew it would probably be the last time I had a floppy disk controller. Anyways, that CD contained a working snapshot of my BBS a couple months before I took it offline. Feeling nostalgic and kind of curious if it would work, I loaded up Dosbox and started the batch file, did a local login and it told me that there were new posts on the message boards. Sure enough, I found the last thread and it was me arguing with about five of my users about IRC with them telling me they were switching over and thinking about quitting BBSes and me saying that it was just instant gratification and that no one really put any "effort" into IRC. I had a tiny burst of Jason Scott-esque sentiment and grabbed some ANSI art that someone had drawn for when you first connected and this amazing exchange, and then turned it off.

So, yeah, I think that argument has been going around a long, long time. But I think I'll still be on the other side of that argument. I think your blog posts are well-written and you obviously spend a decent amount of time crafting them. But would you say that ten of your twitters are equal to one of your blog posts? 100? Would you ever print a year's worth of your tweets into a hardbacked book?

I remember when that Facebook Term's of Service uproar was happening, one of the snarky comments was (I'm paraphrasing), "Like you were going to write Ulysses on your wall?" I laughed, but he kinda had a point.