5th
Invert the Web
I was talking this afternoon with Fred. Over the past few days, he and Jon have been creating a Twitter archiver called TiddlyTweets using TiddlyWiki plugins. It’s cool: you give it a twitter username and it retrieves all the tweets and archives them in a useful fashion, preserving a link to their original URI.
I’ve been hassling Fred about this, as I like to do, because one of the reasons I have liked Twitter is because tweets have, or at least had, a sense of being ephemera. In my mind, if you feel like you need to archive your tweets, then you are doing it completely wrong.
But that’s just my opinion and Fred’s is different. He says there’s good stuff in those tweets which you might want later. This is true enough.
Today, in IRC, he said:
without starting the whole discussion again, after
yesterday's(?) archiving exchange, it struck me as
odd that you're so indifferent - after all, you're a
proponent of cool URIs, which kinda includes permanence
My response went something like this:
Every tweet has its own URI already, the “statuses” URL, so the coolness is basically there already. Fred responds that Twitter is not reliable. This is true but I suggested that archiving was a short term solution to the problem that allows the long term problem to persist. The long term problem is that ones tweets live at Twitter, not in ones own persistent store: Twitter should be a presentation engine which has access to your own microcontent.
This reminded me that in some ways what I’ve been working on for the last ten years or so with Purple Numbers, wikis in general, TiddlyWeb, persistent identifiers etc. are tools to make such things possible. What I’d like to see is an inversion of the current content relationship that is present on the web.
Today I go to a web site and give it some output of my brain. The web site takes my content and in exchange it gives me a URL so I and other people can get to the content again. What should happen instead is that I make some content and give that URL to some websites so they can get to the content.
