I'll try to keep it short...
I had been asking myself; if somehow twitter could be made more interesting, if not for others, at least for me. But, don't get me wrong! I love twitter (as long as the failwhale is nowhere to be seen). I thought about doing a novel or a novelette, or some sort of similar narrative. However, the efforts I had seen in a similar vein made by other (better writers than me!) seemed no to be too cohesive. To my mind they seemed to drift... never to gain any traction in my mind and generate enough interest for me to go and pick up the missed tweets that inevitably came up in the timeline.
As I was asking myself the same question, or it was more like a command (Make twitter more interesting!), I also saw that my number of tweets was steadily climbing (I've gotten addicted to twitter!). First, I wanted to reach two thousand tweets as fast as possible; but when I reached 1949 tweets I thought: "Hey! Wouldn't it be cool to make a novel where each tweet comprised one year of time in the story?" Obviously, the year 1950 could provide plenty of starting ground to make an interesting novel. Obviously the challenge is to write the novel fast enough so that people and I didn't loose interest after the first couple tweets. The problem was, I only knew the starting year for the novel. But how many tweets would it take? How many "years"? And this is where I thought about the other problem which twitter novels have... They seem to go on forever, to be ongoing... And that goes counter to twitter's philosophy of 140 characters at a time... A.K.A:= Keep It Short Stupid!! (The twitter culture's KISS)
And then it hit me... Why not a biography? Each tweet is each year in the person's life... But who to write it about? I've never researched anyone in my life, for real. So the obvious choice was myself... Just another average IT geek, with an idea that perhaps has not been tried before. A twitter auto biography. A twittbio, a fellow twitter called it.
Since twitter is also crowdsourcing at it's best; of course I consulted with my fellow twitterer's about the idea...
About the format of tweets I came up with:
tweet/year# year summary or personal recollection. #man #event #technology #book|movie|song #woman
And about keeping it under 40 tweets... Short, sweet and manageable
They said... Go for it!
And here it goes!
P.S.: I'm having a bitch of a time writing the tweets for the 80's!
P.P.S.: I know that perhaps there is no actual relationship between the number of tweets I've made and the way twitter represents it's data. But hey, let's not be so picky!
