After playing around with it for awhile, I decided to remove my twitter feed. Twitter was started with a very simple purpose: for people to post what they are up to at any given time. In this way it creates a presence infrastructure people can use to communicate passively with each other.
However, the Twitter application itself has acquired on a purpose all its own and has created a digital place that fosters disposable conversation. This evolution of the service has reduced the ability to extract content in a meaningful way. By encouraging conversation, Twitter adds its own context to the status message. The message can no longer stand on its own. If you import these messages they are bereft of meaning.
I was chatting with Tom about this over the weekend and he recognizes this peculiarity as well. His approach is to change his behavior with Twitter and not engage in conversation, preferring to pull his messages into his lovely new site and use them solely to provide status updates. I dig on the community aspect Twitter provides and the random conversations that spring up, so have chosen differently. Twitter will be Twitter, not a glorious and abstract-able presence engine for my digital self. This site will remain a stream of consciousness thread of thoughts, images, videos, and chats that inspire me.
