Twitter or write a book? Hm…
I have written over 8600 Tweets on Twitter. Let’s say that I’ve averaged 15 words per Tweet. That’s 129,000 words.
If an average book has 250 words per page, then those 8600 Tweets are equal to 516 pages of printed matter. Or, if you like your print squished a bit tighter, at 500 words per page, then that’s 258 pages of material.
You can argue words/page, words/Tweet, and so on, but given the magnitude of activity out there, it seems pretty clear to me:
I’ve written enough Tweets to fill a book.
This is a sobering thought for me.
On one hand, I’ve connected with a number of interesting people via Twitter (more than 3,150 as of the moment that I’m writing this post.)
On the other hand… I could have written a book in the same amount of words.
Which course of action would have been better? I don’t know: I can see advantages and disadvantages to both paths. I also know that it’s one thing to string together words 140 characters at a time and quite another thing to write a larger document that’s cohesive, useful, and interesting to read.
The main lesson that I take from this is that it’s quite possible for a lot of small effort over time to amount to something much larger.
What do you think?
Ari Herzog:
Why don't you build some tool that exports your 8600 tweets and imports them into a Scribd-like format so you can truly show them off in a book?
16 May 2009, 11:22 pmMark Dykeman:
Things is, Ari, there is probably a lot of crap in my Twitter stream that isn't worth preserving. It is an interesting idea, to pull it out into book format like you describe, but it's of limited long term value. I was more interested in the sheer quantity of words.
17 May 2009, 4:28 amPierro:
Yeah twitter needs a lot of time too, but i still love it.
)
So take a look at http://www.tweetbook.in and “write”
your book
Salut
17 May 2009, 6:10 amMark Dykeman:
Interesting concept, but the link that you provided tells me to go to a different webpage where I have to log on using by Twitter account ID and my Twitter password. Sorry, not ready to do that.
17 May 2009, 6:50 amRoberto R. Cerrada:
It's enough easy write 8900 differents piece of 140 characters information, about different things and events, that write a compelling book that you can maintaing the prospect attention along 500 words.
Write an book is more about build and unique history around one concept, technique or strategy. Twitt 140 charateres is about make a conversation, share fresh information or some thing like this.
Anyway, are two different things that you can't compare…
Regards
18 May 2009, 3:32 pmRoberto R. Cerrada
Shelly Lodes:
Yep, unless your tweets stay on topic ALL the time I don't suppose it would read well as a book. Interesting concept. Maybe you could mine the good stuff tho' =) BTW how much time DOES it take to tweet 8600 times!
18 May 2009, 4:47 pmMark Dykeman:
It took me over a year, Shelly.
18 May 2009, 5:59 pmraj:
Seriously, you can't compare 130K words of tweet text to the equivalent of a book. As someone who has written a book and also write over 2 million words in the past 10 years, I know that the latter collection has a lot of garbage that even I don't want to read ever again. So those 2 million words are hardly something bigger than the individual pieces of quality. (Though I might able to extract quality nuggest and add all new text.)
On the other hand, if you have common themes running through your tweets, maybe you can write a book around those themes, explaining why/ how/ when/ etc those tweets came about — in the context of how to be an effective “microblogger”.
20 May 2009, 8:08 pmMark Dykeman:
As I've explained above, Raj, “there is probably a lot of crap in my Twitter stream that isn't worth preserving. It is an interesting idea, to pull it out into book format like you describe, but it's of limited long term value. I was more interested in the sheer quantity of words.” So I don't disagree with you on that point. It's merely an expression of magnitude. Also, it's an alternate way of looking at things, as in “Hm, what would have happened if I put the same time and effort into writing a book instead?” I'm not implying that the content in my Tweets warrants a book, not by a long shot. I'm saying that a similar amount of effort, applied differently, would have yielded a big deliverable. But I'm sure you're a smart guy, Raj, and that you probably figured that out on your own. Right?
21 May 2009, 7:32 pmBrandon Sheley:
What really gets me is the people that think just because they have 3,000 followers on twitter, that they “should” write a book.
22 May 2009, 11:59 pmPersonally I like Twitter for the reason you mentioned, the conversations you have on twitter, wouldn't equal the contacts you could make writing a book with no following.
Mark Dykeman:
I think I should write a book someday, but it has nothing to do with Twitter.
23 May 2009, 6:02 pmRavi Sagar:
..but writing a book does not mean that you can connect to the same number of people. Writing random twitter messages is much easy than writing a book
25 May 2009, 3:14 amMichael Kozakewich:
A regular novel page is about 5.5″ x 8″, right? What if you made a novel that was 5.5″ x 1″, and each page contained no more than 160 characters?
It would be a fantastic project.
25 May 2009, 11:32 pmMark Dykeman:
It might just create the world's thickest book, too.
26 May 2009, 6:02 amTerriRains:
Balance it out. A shorter book AND a whole lotta Tweetin'.
27 May 2009, 4:07 pm