So today I tried to backup all of my tweets; and that went terribly. I t seems strange that such an idea has never occurred to anyone. Or rather to say it has, but no serious effort can be found that grants any merit to the idea of managing and collecting links or other information posted on Twitter. It is just stuck in the box. I can manually do it, but at the rate the internet proceeds it would be impossible. I know that the do-it-yourself spirit of the internet would say: “Twitter has an API! You can build any kind of application if you think you need it so badly!” But the odds of me sitting down and figuring all that sort of shit out is probably nil.
I once read an article, whose name and topic escapes me, that said that the sum of your expression is defined by the practices of your epistemology. Or in other words, how treat knowledge determines how you use it. A link, to me is the atom of hyper-textual knowledge; it’s base unit. And if even that basic particle of information is unmanageable or spread out over different platforms or services then how is anything significant to be accomplished? What I want is an application called the Harvester, whose sole purpose is to reach into Twitter, Facebook, or variously defunct blogs and rip out all of the links I have collected and then test them for degradation. Link rot is the second biggest problem I have. (What is the point of saving 1,000+ links on del.icio.us if half of them are dead and you can’t even tell?) I would then like to sort them in a smooth and flexible way like the organizer Flickr uses. Both temporarily and permanently; for the sake of being able to export them in any fashion or arrangement I choose after editing and being able to digest them in a significant way. Long term storage and use and reuse is the key without having to dig and dig, auto-synopsis and that sort of thing. Let me think and write, not troll around the internet try to figure out if sometings are even possible. Is this so crazy?