For the young 'uns among you, when Twitter started up it had an IM mode – you could add twitter to your buddy list and all the tweets from people you followed ticked away in a chat window and when you wanted to tweet, you just said something but of course you had to remember to keep to 140 characters. I loved it. I could work away and just keep an eye on the (slowly) flowing river of tweets. There were no hashtags and @-replies were a crowd-created shorthand rather than a hardwired part of the system.
Of course gchat conversations are automatically archived in gmail and although I'm sure I must have deleted many, I have just had a look and found that I have 534 sets of archived tweet chats from July 2007 to July 2008 some containing as many as 3,000 lines. Above is a screenshot from the earliest one I have – you can see that they're all timestamped too.
The question is, what to do with them all…?
hmmm…..