It’s just an un-scientific hunch, but twitter seems to “got game”. Jaiku flickered and faded. Pownce came out with a nice interface, threads, but I’m still tuned to twitter. It’s this dog’s rule that there is never a ‘best’ technology, just the one you happen to be using at the time. It’s going to all by transient for the next millennium or so.
Recently I’ve been using on a twitter process I’ve not really heard described or even mentioned (that’s not to say it has not happened, as I am not the all seeing Orb).
I’m thinking about the process when you’ve been away from twitter for a while (for some that means 3 hours, for others, it is days or more). You come back at the end of a raft of distended, semi-unraveled conversations. Of course we are used to reverse chronology in blog posts, but those are large chunks of content that are not typically dependent on what came earlier. It is trying to make sense when you know the punch line, and you page [ack one twitter screen at a time, kind of like stratigraphy, until it ravels back to sense, or you find yourself back in the layer of tweets you’ve seen on the last visit.
But in twitter, there is this process of picking up the frayed end of yarn, and trying to follow it strands back to the big ball, peeling back conversations in reverse order, pulling away the ones that don’t relate. Maybe it is like follow conversations in the form of Memento.
This may not help this issue at all, but I stumbled across a nifty twitter function that is not detailed anywhere. If you are logged in and go to http://twitter.com/replies it will reveal all tweets that were in “reply” to something you said. I just checked it out and found a reply Bryan Alexander had made to something I asked of him via twitter, but had missed his reply in normal browse mode. So the “replies” link is useful for finding some of the strands of yarns you may have started (or dont want to miss).
Actually credit for that goes to JD on EP (linktribution – hola John Dowdell It’s been a lot of clicks gone by since you got me on the Shockwave beta.
Lastly, when one is drawing a blank for something profound to expound in 140 taps, there is the deep philosophical question, “What would Gardner Tweet?”
😉 for you, Dr Glu!
Great find! I’ve struggled with missed Tweets and this will surely help.