Nuance. Is there a Twitter exception?

Over at his blog, Alexis Madrigal wonders if Twitter should be an exception:

Twitter has no memory, though. It’s the goldfish service, forever forgetting where it was just a few moments ago. (Perhaps that accounts for the irrepresibly happy tone of Tweets. “Wow” is probably the most common descriptor for a link.)

But what if you want to have a conversation — or just a feed — that is preserved? Twitter can’t do that for you. It won’t do that for you. Under those circumstances one can be forgiven for wanting to pipe one’s Tweets elsewhere.

Go read the whole thing. It’s nicely argued and brings in Russian literary theory which lends the kind of gravitas that I’ve always felt my strong opinions about the manner in which you update people about your sandwich choices have lacked.

What I like best about Alexis’ post is how it turns my logic to his end. The argument that you should unlink your feeds is really a client-side solution to a server-side problem. Piping your Twitter feed into another service is a client-side solution to a different server-side problem.

I shouldn’t have to be asking you to unlink your feeds because every social networking service should give me the ability to mute subsets of your output. At minimum, I should be able to mute any of the accounts that your choose to import. Ideally (for power users), I ought to have a set of filters as robust as an email client’s. Currently, most services don’t offer that, so unlinking your feeds is a way to give everyone that ability manually. If all of your output is separated into streams, then I can decide on my end which of them to follow.

Alexis sees a different server-side problem: Twitter is bad at archiving Tweets. It’s pretty terrible at threading conversations too, so when you want to preserve one of the better discussions that sometimes flare up, you have to do it manually (an awkward process, as both he and I recently learned).

I’m convinced in the abstract - indeed nothing I say here even begins to address the most interesting parts of his post - but there’s one question that Alexis didn’t address: To where?

Twitter posts are an especially weirdly shaped peg. The necessary brevity mixed with the auto-linked @names and #hashtags means that a lot of tweets feel very out of place when you feed them to another service. The stream-of-thought culture of Twitter means a frequency and tone (“wow”, indeed) of posts that’s often inappropriate elsewhere.

So while I get the desire to archive and preserve, the question must also be: upon whom are you inflicting this solution? If you are preserving just for yourself, do you need to feed it somewhere public? If you are preserving for others, how will it impact the people reading that other feed? In that case, all of my concerns and objections come back into play.

A possible solution is feeding your tweets to a dedicated account. More on that soon…