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!










Comments
I got mentioned on c|net's
I got mentioned on c|net's Buzz Out Loud (link: http://is.gd/13l5).
Thanks to macnatico for bringing it to my attention.
Well it seems the guys at Buzz Out Loud were a bit confused as to what I was doing. And I think it's pretty understandable; since I started to put what #tweet I was on, way before I started to do the twittbio itself.
But the reason I started to put the number of tweets I was at, before doing the bio is simple... twitter is unreliable!... And knowing that I wanted to test is something strange happened to my tweets before starting the project.
But just to be clear: The twittbio started on tweet number 1971 (three years before I was born) with one prologue for my father, my mother, and my brothers... it will also end with some epilogues that I am still writing.
Please excuse me, but you will not get everything, perhaps not anything, right the first time. So there, hope everything is clearer now...
This has been such an hectic
This has been such an hectic week for me! I should have started this later!
Work has been really demanding these past days, so I haven't been able to post as much of my twittbio as I would have liked. On the other side however, the extra time this has given me to think about the bio has made it somewhat easier to write about the 80's... Like having my first video game console (2600) and my first computer (the venerable Commodore 64)... I hope all of you are looking out for my tweets, or thinking about doing your own twittbio.
Hey, if you do- do something like it- then post the link here!
WOW! Go for it! The first
WOW! Go for it! The first tweets are coming great! I will post in my blog.
http://bauerjorge.wordpress.com/
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