Slashdot Mirror
One-Tweet Wonders
theodp writes "TIME has seen-the-future-and-it-is-Twitter. Slate, on the other hand, is more fascinated with the phenomenon of orphaned tweets, the messages left by people who sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return (not unlike one-blog-post wonders). While some orphan tweets betray skepticism about microblogging ('I don't get it... what's the point of this thing?'), other one-and-done Twitterers demonstrate keen enthusiasm before disappearing ('I'm here!'), and some tweets hint that tragedy has cut a promising Twittering-life short ('it hurts to breathe. should I go to the hospital?'). Slate notes that studies of Twitter accounts by Harvard and Nielsen suggest the service has been better at signing up users than keeping them, including the one-tweet wonders."
I created the AbrahamLincon user in response to a back-and-forth discussion on political rhetoric a friend and I were engaged in. (Yeah, in my haste I dropped the 'l' in the last name. Oops.) He was using the Lincoln/Douglas debates as an example of the high quality of political debate that our country once valued, and from which we had fallen into sound bites. He asked what possible message of political worth could be tweeted in 140 chars.
As an experiment, I created AbrahamLincon, reviewed the text of the Gettysburg address, and distilled it to 140 characters. I won't say it succeeded or failed, but it was a fun experiment in high-density verbiage.
I might do the same with other speeches. Or it might stay a one-tweet wonder. It was fun, though, and I hope Mr. Lincoln wouldn't mind.