50K Tweets and Counting

I am not sure it sounds like a lot or a little when I say it this way, but in the 12 years I have been writing about telecom, I have, at a minimum, written enough words to fill Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” and Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy.” That’s roughly 1.56 million words — none of which had the impact of any of these three memorable novels. Hell, they haven’t had the impact of a Danielle Steele novel.

But this blog isn’t about impact or depth or even being worth a damn. This is about word count, or more accurately — character count.

Given that the average number of letters — or in the new Twitter parlance: characters — in a word is 4.5, I have authored the equivalent of 7.02 million characters or 50,143 tweets. And given the literary or journalistic depth of tweets, it appears I have wasted just under 25 percent of my life.

But now, Twitter has been raised to a new level. As our Craig Galbraith reports here the Library announced that it will begin archiving the collected works of Twitter “probably alongside the collected works of Twain and Voltaire.”

I see nothing wrong with collecting a part of history and Twitter has certainly played its part. But here is my question. There is little of substance in 99.999 percent (five nines is something a telco guy just can’t get away from) of Twitter messages. The Iranian election and natural disaster aside, the value of Twitter—and I now see it—is not in the messages themselves, but in the blogs and other content they lead you to and the hash-tags that form the semblance of a conversation. Unless I am missing something, the content of most tweets tells historians or sociologist of the future very little and can be misleading without the added value of the content to which they lead.

And what of the conversations we have day in and day out where words are reduced to wispy flatulence or stored only in the living memory of those who hear them? Lost eventually to the relentless tick of time? Without their context, what good are tweets alone? For what purpose are we storing tweets?

It reminds me of the David Brin short story in which future archeologists dig through the garbage dumps of Los Angeles to get a sense of how we primitives lived. I think they’ll have better luck that sifting through the 167 terabytes they have collected already—unless of course they figure out how to link them to the actual events or content about which they are tweeting.

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