TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "twitter"
![Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics
It’s not every day that you listen to an album that can be traced to a single tweet:
One day on Twitter a little over a year ago, I tweeted the question, ‘Who is better: The Dramatics or The Delfonics?’ and people went back and forth saying who they thought was better, and one guy said, ‘Hey, I know William Hart of The Delfonics.’ I said, ‘Wow, OK.’ And he’s like, ‘Yo, I’m a fan of your music, man. I would love for you and him to do music together.’ To me, it’s always been a dream to do something with The Delfonics, but people say things all the time. It’s Hollywood. So [to] make a long story short, a day later, I’m on the phone with William Hart and we’re speaking for like two hours and then we’re speaking the next day for like two hours, and we hit it off in a way that was just cosmic.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/7522b43ac41f2d098814ac74b716035b/tumblr_mjkkqz5pDi1qz6f4bo1_500.jpg)
Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics
It’s not every day that you listen to an album that can be traced to a single tweet:
One day on Twitter a little over a year ago, I tweeted the question, ‘Who is better: The Dramatics or The Delfonics?’ and people went back and forth saying who they thought was better, and one guy said, ‘Hey, I know William Hart of The Delfonics.’ I said, ‘Wow, OK.’ And he’s like, ‘Yo, I’m a fan of your music, man. I would love for you and him to do music together.’ To me, it’s always been a dream to do something with The Delfonics, but people say things all the time. It’s Hollywood. So [to] make a long story short, a day later, I’m on the phone with William Hart and we’re speaking for like two hours and then we’re speaking the next day for like two hours, and we hit it off in a way that was just cosmic.
Twitter as a machine for book invention
@JoyceCarolOates is a great follow on Twitter—she’s funny and interesting—but you get the feeling from a few of her tweets that she still sees it as a waste of time, a distraction from the actual work of book writing, as many authors do. But for some of us, Twitter is where we first get our thoughts down. Twitter is our public notebook, the place where we think out loud, let other people think back at us, then hopefully think some more.
The thing about keeping notebooks is that you have to revisit them in order to get the most out of them, and Twitter is like a notebook in which the more pages you fill, the more pages disappear. If you use it properly, your tweets are eventually lost to time. And this is part of what makes it so great, says Matt Haughey in his excellent essay, “Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook”:
There’s no memory at Twitter: everything is fleeting. Though that concept may seem daunting to some (archivists, I feel your pain), it also means the content in my feed is an endless stream of new information, either comments on what is happening right now or thoughts about the future.
Twitter, in Robin Sloan’s terms, is all flow and no stock: “Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.” Books, on the other hand, are stock: “Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years?) as it is today.”
In my experience, stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon flow. You gather your bits, combine them, and then turn them into something new. But this process requires being able to get at your flow. There are various 3rd-party ways to backup your tweets, but there isn’t yet a way to access it through the official Twitter interface. Twitter’s CEO says you’ll be able to download your archive by the end of the year, but I wouldn’t hold your breath…
Filed under: Twitter
(Title of this post is a play off Jason Kottke’s post, “Twitter is a machine for continual self-invention”)
Great little story about how video game artist Adam Capone’s @PeterMolydeux account of ridiculous game ideas inspired “What Would MolyDeux?” game jams and actually inspired the legendary game designer Peter Molyneux to quit his job at Microsoft and start his own game company.
#dailyobit
In the spirit of @shamblanderson’s sentence of the day, I’m posting my favorite obituaries from my morning obituary reading on Twitter under the hashtag #dailyobit.
Alain de Botton’s book tour tweets
Getting the jitters about going on such a long book tour, so my agent suggested reading @alaindebotton’s tweets to prepare myself.
Oh, and I just watched Contagion. Not recommended if you’d like to ever leave the house again.
Also, we have the #humblebrag, I think we also need the #worrybrag
