When you tweet something, it’s small, ephemeral. It makes sense that it would vanish like a puff of smoke. After all, aren’t tweets largely pointless babble anyway?
But what if you want to look back at what you said, or, better yet, search for something you tweeted?
Good luck.
For all its benefits and delights, Twitter has a lousy memory. Here’s an example:
I searched for all my tweets with the word “narrative” in them. Twitter found:
Nada.
Here’s the same search on Friendfeed (which collects my tweets as well as other utterances from my blog, Delicious, etc.):
Nine results, stretching back to March.
I did a brute-force look for the “narrative” tweets on Twitter, by displaying my profile and pressing “more” at the bottom of the page repeatedly. They’re all there. Why didn’t search find them? Your guess is as good as mine.
So why would you need to search back through your own tweetstream? Well, for one, I like to use Twitter for link-sharing. Finding and sharing an article I like is a really fun part of the service. But sometimes after sharing a link, I find I want to explore it more, perhaps by writing a blog post about it.
But if I can’t find it easily, I can’t do it. I’m considering using Delicious for all that stuff, feeding it through Friendfeed, and auto-tweeting it from there. It’ll work fine, but seems a bit convoluted, doesn’t it?
Tags: bookmarking, friendfeed, linking, sharing, Twitter
