[Air-L] Twittering

[Liz]

It's not an adequate solution, Alex, but this transience is why I send copies of my Tweets over to Friend Feed. Twitter search only goes back about 6 days but I can search for Tweets (my own or others) on FF that are months or a year old. I've found that feature of FF so useful it justifies my use of that network.

It still is not the same as being to download and analyze a person's entire archive of Tweets. As far as I've been told by Twitter, these messages are all "in storage" but are not presently accessible. I don't think this is a high priority item for them but maybe one day we'll be able to go back to 2006 and see the conversations that were occurring among early adopters.

Liz Pullen
nwjerseyliz at yahoo.com




________________________________
From: Alex Randall <alex at islands.vi>
To: Rhiannon Bury <rcbury at rogers.com>; RBerkman at aol.com; haythorn at illinois.edu; gcheliotis.lists at gmail.com; aoir.z3z at danah.org
Cc: air-l at aoir.org
Sent: Mon, November 2, 2009 4:23:33 PM
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Twittering
One wonders what historians of this era will use as primary sources...
MS Word no longer supports the data files of the 1980's.
As if that company could disconnect me from my own writing without asking my opinion.

Try to read files from 8 inch floppy disks and you have to ask the Smithsonian for the use of their machines in glass cases.
All that era is inaccessible.

In 2000, I put a CD in a time capsule.
Same year they opened a time capsule in Colorado from 1900.
Inside were gold foil cylinders from an original Edison phonograph.
Off to the Smithsonian to listen to them.
I wonder if anyone in 100 years will be able to read my CD?

I wonder if anyone will be able to even find the tweets of today, tomorrow.
We are arriving in a culture of the instant.
and in an instant - it will be gone.


Alex Randall
Professor of Communication
University of the Virgin Islands.

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