In the year of responsibility, I’m trying to clean out everything – computer bookmarks, closets, and on and on. If it can be pruned down and organized, I want to do it.
So, the other day I went and cleaned out my twitter favorites (and my old tweets). (This was so very far down on the priority list of things that need to be cleaned out. I probably should’ve spent time on other more pressing things… but I love twitter. And it was easy and mobile.)
I cleaned out the favorites because I used to mark articles and things I wanted to revisit later. Now that I have the amazing pocket app, I no longer need to do that.
It was surprisingly sort of time consuming, but it was actually pretty fun to go through all the old tweets I favorited.
I learned something a little off about twitter’s favorite system. Apparently you can only have so many active favorites at a time. I don’t know how many it is, but it’s not an unlimited amount. So, if you want to un-favorite things to kind of clean out all your old favorites – you can’t scroll back to the beginning and go from there. First, you have to get rid of your newest favorites. After a certain number of recent favorites, your older ones get “locked in” until you have more favorites available to revert after cleaning out your newer ones.
(Did any of that make sense? I think the moral of that little story is just to never clean out your favorites. Use pocket to mark things. Use favorites just to mark approvals (though sometimes I still use it just to mark things – I know, bad me). And don’t ever clean out your favorites. Just let ’em ride forever.)
Anyway, in doing that, I got a fun little look back at memory lane. I got a glimpse of the events that were important to America (or at least in my sphere of America).
There were some fun election tweets. (One of my favorites was: “If Tagg Romney can buy the voting machines in the swing states I should be able to have all the Emmy ballots sent to my house for counting.” – @jessetyler)
There were some good award show tweets. (How much do we all adore tina Fey and Amy Poehler?)
@bjnovak had the best Boston Marathon tweet (in my opinion) which was: “Well, I guess Boston won’t be talking much about Rosie Ruiz anymore.” I thought it was the perfect joke. It was such a terribly sad week that I thought laughter was appropriate (even though many who replied to him did not).
I could make a remake of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” just by going through twitter. Lance Armstrong, instagram terms of service, Disney Star Wars, 30 Rock finale, etc. There’d be some gun violence event followed by tweets asking for gun control followed by tweets saying it was too soon, followed by another gun violence event and that circle is still repeating even now.
I saw a bunch of awesome jokes going through my favorites. Basically, I just constantly favorited everything @AaronFullerton and @KenJennings said because they have awesome timelines.
It was fun to see events in my own life too – running the races, going on The Price is Right – and people tweeting me about those things. It’s like a nice little highlight reel of the big moments in my life.
I saw some stuff from early in my twitter life when I really had no idea what I was doing (not that I truly know now) where I thought – “That would’ve made a much better RT than a favorite! Why didn’t I RT that?”
But, you live and you learn, I suppose.
I also cleaned out not just my favorites, but also my timeline. For me, the jury’s still out on whether you should delete tweets or not. However, I don’t delete things because they’re gonna ruin me or whatever. I delete things that not a single soul found interesting.
And I think the goal is to eventually just not tweet such things. You know, it’s a learning experience of what people react to and what they don’t. And I feel like if people don’t react with a favorite, RT, or response, then why leave that trash on my timeline? Why not just realize… “uh, nobody likes this.”
Sometimes I think I over-prune my timeline. Sometimes I think I under-prune it. I think it’s all just learning more each time.