Really writing forces us to lock the words into whatever contraption is being used to write. I like typewriters because it’s hard to take out the paper and crumple it up while writing. The easiest movement is FORWARD. Typewriters are momentum machines. Real writing pushes forward. Tweets push in every direction at once. These are not value judgements, these are just some observations.
Frank Chimero – Tweeting and Writing and Deflating Like a Balloon.
November 1st was the last time I posted anything on Twitter. Since then this blog has been my home online.
A couple of days ago Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a thank you letter to Evan Williams. It was a powerful piece and got me thinking. While Twitter still frustrates me in many ways it nonetheless remains an incredible community and a remarkable publishing tool.[ref]I still dream of the loosely coupled network Dave Winer talks about[/ref] It’s simple, fast, and available everywhere.
Recently I kept a Twitter folder in my RSS reader of a group of people who I wanted to follow. This felt like a total hack. Similarly, while some people have taken to blogging more, the reality is that a ton (the majority?) of conversation still happens on Twitter. I want to be a part of that again. Conversation is integral to keeping the mind fresh and churning.
I’m setting some ground rules to keep things sane. I plan to follow fewer people. Nothing against the 100 or so people I unfollowed last night. It’s just that I only have so many brain cycles in a day. I’m currently at about 150. That feels like a good number to me for now. Maybe it’ll go up a bit but probably not too much.
Most importantly, anything I post on Twitter will be published here. My blog is my home online. When I publish content I want to bring it into that home, not relegate it to a rented storage locker out back.
I’ll also get my tweet archive back up and running. Even with Twitter, though, if it’s important enough to post then I should be blogging about it. As Anil Dash said, if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen.
How to Track the Future of the Music Industry. Marshall Kirkpatrick gives a bit of insight into how he’s tracking the future of the music industry via Twitter. This type of journalism-hacking is brilliant.
The distraction trope. Every new technology brings distraction, but only for a time. The distraction will pass and wonderful possibilities await if we believe that the person next to us is not merely distracted by the latest shiny toy.
Twitter Was Act One. Really fascinating feature on Jack Dorsey. It covers everything from his childhood, to Twitter, to Square.
Why did Twitter suspend UberTwitter? Bill Gross, CEO of UberMedia, gives the background of why Twitter suspended UberTwitter, UberCurrent, and Twidroyd. Ruh oh, time to watch out for the gulag.
LongReply – When you care more than 140 characters. Interesting tool MailChimp has developed for custom support via Twitter. The keyword analysis and hourly email summaries look nifty.
37signals launched a bulk subscription suite for their apps a couple of days ago. In the launch announcement I noticed that they refer to users as owning their apps:
Currently the 37signals Suite is only available for people who already own a Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire account. If you own any one of these apps you can upgrade to the Suite in less than 60 seconds. We will be offering the ability to sign up for the Suite from scratch down the road, but we just don’t know when yet. Note: If you don’t own one of our products yet, and you’d like to purchase the Suite, just sign up for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire and then follow the upgrade instructions above. (emphasis mine)
Despite the fact that you pay a monthly fee to use those apps 37signals says users own the product. They back this up by allowing a functional HTML or XML export of most content at any time.
Compare that to Twitter, whose Terms of Service say “what’s yours is yours – you own your content.” Sounds similar right? Too bad Twitter does not provide a way to export more than 3200 tweets.
My last post threw me against an odd stumbling block with new-style retweets on Twitter: there are no permalinks for retweets.
In a post explaining the changes to retweets almost a year ago Evan Williams noted various problems with the old style of retweets. Two mentioned were that retweets were untrackable and that they created confusion over attribution. This may be true of the old style but the new method is even worse for attribution in any medium other than Twitter’s.
That post I mention above was about a slick, adaptive CSS grid framework. I only found it because Lauren Rabaino retweeted an earlier post from Nathan Smith.
So what are my options if I want to give Lauren credit in a blog post?
I can link to her profile page which will be irrelevant for that tweet in a short while.
I could link to the original tweet from Nathan Smith. This would show Lauren’s profile picture as one of the retweets but it doesn’t scale well. If the tweet were more popular and had dozens of retweets Lauren’s information might not even appear. For example, 56 people retweeted this but only 15 avatars show.
There ought to be an easier way. Twitter should have a permalink to both the original tweet as well as something I can link to showing it was Lauren that made me aware of the post.
Proper attribution in this case only exists within Twitter’s platform. Maybe that’s the point. If that’s true it’s frustrating to say the least. Retweeting is a form of publishing and we as users ought to be able to link to any form of published content on the web.
Alex Payne on Twitter’s need to decentralize:
Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized, and that all businesses who build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down.
The entire post, which Alex says are his last words concerning Twitter, is well worth the read.
