Twit was the worst on times, twit was the best of times

While reading some blogs this weekend I found the millionth or so great post on twitter, this one titled “My Essential Twitter Tools” from Jeremiah Owyang. It highlights how a service (that long left behind it’s cell phone roots) has become entrenched throughout our various connected devices and processes. Beyond our browsers and phones it has become aggregated, searched, and most importantly archived. No matter how or what your input is you are writing a story, an autobiography in fact.

Birth and Childhood

For many of us, our first twit was something like the above. Birth on Twitter is very much a “Hello World” experience. What was yours? Go back and see for yourself, just follow these simple steps:

1. View Your Profile

2. Make note of your total number of Twits

3. Divide your total twits by 20 (the amount of twits displayed on each page).

4. You should now have the page number (plus or minus 1) of your first twits. Visit http://twitter.com/YOURNAME?page=X replacing the red variables with proper info.

Your Greatest Hits

Hugh Macleod, truer words were never spoken.

The “favorites” section on Twitter is probably one of the most under used yet greatest features. Here you can save your favorite twits from friends and of course your own. In the river of Twitter data these are those few and precious gems that float by. I’ve started to use mine a lot more recently and find revisiting them is always good for a snicker or a grin. To tag a Twit as a favorite all you need to do is click the star icon, this is displayed at the end of each one.

Death (aka The Last Twit)

Marc Orchant’s final Twit, a week before his passing.

Imagine for a moment that tomorrow you step out in front of a bus and WHAMO. Mothers used to worry about clean underwear, perhaps now we have to think of clean status updates. If you are anything like me you will leave in your wake a handful of profiles and pages, scattered across the internet. Many of these services like Twitter are going to display your last impression for, well….forever? I suppose that really depends how long these services remain online and continue to archive this content for us. This of course opens up all other types of discussion on digital immortality we just have time to go into at the moment.

Publishing Your Life

Of course you are already doing this, some more than others and some perhaps a little too much. Twitter just happens to be an incredibly easy and accessible medium to write such a life story. While chances are no one is going to bind and stock your Twitter autobiography, if you write it someone just might read it. Now start thinking about things like “are my kids going to read this?”.

Featured Autobiographies above include:
Dave Winer, Eric Rice, and Robert Scoble

Filed Under: twitter