Sunday, November 28, 2010

From Twitter to Facebook…

I have been living on Twitter for almost two years now and had found it to be a satisfying means of expression. Some introspection is due if I consider what I say important enough to record for all time because these two years of tweets are all but gone (to me at least). In most cases that is fine but often I wish I had recorded some of these thoughts more permanently for my own reference; something like the difference between one's unrecorded actual life and one's personal diary. If you don't put it in your diary it is only a memory, and my memory fades and distorts.

New Twitter, the recent upgrade, is much less satisfying to me than the old Twitter. Refining one's input with lists is better but as a means of expression I find it worse, mostly because I get less feed back—but also because of the so-called "hourly usage limit" which only occasionally works and when it does often it is totally unfair. So I've decided that when that happens I will switch to Facebook.

On Facebook I've begun a few longer dialogs, commenting on various things. I'm still a beginner and am slow to add new friends, afraid I will be overwhelmed. I've realized that some of these longer comments are worth saving and rewriting on this blog. So I'm going to rewrite some comments that I made on my quest for the nature of God and post them here next.

2 comments:

Kohan Ikin said...

Heya Andi,

If you're wanting to keep a permanent record of your Tweets, you might want to check out TweetSaver. I've been using them for a while and been quite happy with them. My Tweets are now searchable (albeit slowly), as are DMs and mentions. I think TweetSaver can only go back 3200 tweets, though, due to Twitter API limits. You can export to CSV too.

Another option is Backupify, but I tried it and didn't like it as much - I think they only exported the tweets irregularly and only to PDF. It's free though. I've also heard that Twitter still has an archive of all tweets and will eventually make them available.

A tip for backing up Facebook - although they now have the Download Your Information link, if someone defriends you, you'll also lose anything they posted on your wall... so you need to download your info fairly regularly if you want a full archive.

Can't say I'm a fan of Newtwitter :) But I've always preferred to use a Twitter client, Tweetie is still my favorite.

andi said...

Hey Kohan, Good to hear from you again. :) It's been too long… Thanks for the comment. I've been at odds with myself about a Twitter archive right from the beginning though I always assumed Twitter kept one. I always get bogged down in my own archives, I end up spending more time organizing the past than venturing into the future so an inert archive that simply accumulates somewhere offsite is probably the best for me.

Good to know about the FB archive, I'll begin downloading them. I've come to regard Twitter as just a linear stream-of-consciousness and do favorite the gems. From time to time I will open the Favorite window fully and save it to disk so I do have an edited archive going back almost to the beginning.

I've never been able to warm up to any of the Twitter clients and have just used Safari and Firefox.

Thanks again, give me a friend request on FB, I'm still a total beginner there so I don't always respond in a timely way.