What Were You Thinking? 1000 Tweets.

About to graduate high school and with the new millennium dawning, I became painfully conscious of time's passage. Memories are fleeting. We've a lot of life to live and much of it is reduced to highlight reels: a photo album, a fuzzy memory, the feeling a song evokes. I decided to make an effort to better preserve my experiences.

I kept a journal. I wrote down my thoughts and feelings, what I was doing, what everyone else was doing. I could go back and re-read this later to gain better understanding of where I'd come from and where I was going. I kept this journal for exactly one day.

It still sits on a bookshelf, mocking me. When I open it, I'm ripped through a decade-wide wormhole.  A few times since I attempted to start again, always with the same result. It's near impossible to sit down and write a coherent account of life, so varied and full of stimuli.

Recently I noticed I'm approaching 1000 Twitter updates. There's lots of talk good and bad about the service, so I decided to go back through my tweets from the beginning to see if I've been wasting my time or actually adding value by sending five or so updates per day.

Conclusion: we're writing our autobiographies, memoirs -- commenting on history in real-time. Some future digital archaeologist with a wicked algorithm is going to understand the world we live in now through our tweets. The shortened links may all well be broken, but the soul will remain. It's only a matter of time before a major disaster is live-tweeted by a large segment of a population. Maybe that disaster will be averted by Twitter, who knows.

It's time to realize that this really is a micro-blog, and start using it that way. You may be answering "What are you doing?", but you will one day look back and wonder, "what was I thinking, then?"

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