Why am I experimenting with a Twitter replacement?
If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed some weirdness popping up lately.
Namely, I’ve been routing all my posts through this blog rather than writing them directly in Twitter. It’s an experiment I’ve been thinking about for a long time now.
Those thoughts have very little to do with Twitter’s recent foray into developer crackdown, but it helped make this final flip over to this arrangement (temporary though it may be).
Largely, I started thinking back over all the content I’ve written over on Twitter: four jobs, two kids, an autism diagnosis for one of those kids, a house purchase and 10,000+ bits of my life at 140 characters or so at a time. It’s a pretty big chunk of my life and I have no way of accessing much of it.
Oh, it’s in there somewhere, buried in a Twitter database of some sort in a datacenter of some sort and accessible if you know the URL for each individual tweet. But I can’t readily access anything older than my most recent 3,200 tweets. I can’t find that tweet where I welcomed my son into the world. Or on the day he was diagnosed with autism. Or the day my daughter was born.
They’re all as good as gone.
I’m hopeful that some day in the future, Twitter will let us go back further, or let us download all of our tweets, but I’m not willing to wait that long.
And app.net is really no better. At some point, I’ll realize I’m handing over all of these moments in my life to live on someone else’s servers, in someone else’s databases and someone else’s datacenters, and end up right back where I am today.
So, for now I’ll go with this bailing wire and duct tape approach:
Anything that goes to Twitter will start its life here as a “Status” tumblelog item.
Once I publish, it’ll post something to Twitter. Right now, I’m routing everything through Buffer, but I’ll be changing that shortly (once I find/build a WP-to-Twitter solution that handles what I’d like it to do).
I’m still going to use Tweetbot and the like to follow folks on Twitter. I like too many folks over there to cut it out completely, after all. Longer-term, I might look for other ways to handle that, but that’s less of a concern for me than making sure I have access to and control over the originals of what I write, no matter how short and insignificant those writings may seem from time to time.