What Does 1 Month Of Tweets Look Like?

There are no shortage of visualization tools to help you understand your tweet stream. I’d like to add another one: the paper trail.

For the past month I’ve been printing my tweets. It’s an experiment and an admittedly narcissistic pursuit.

Here’s what makes the magic happen; it’s an Adafruit Internet of Things Printer:

It’s a thermal printer that’s connected to the Net. It pings search.twitter.com and find every time I tweet.

After a month that’s a roll of paper that stretched twenty feet along my floor:

Another perspective comes from hanging it from the ceiling:

Here’s a close-up of a tweet:

This is stunningly banal stuff. Any individual tweet does not conjure up a heckuva lot of emotion (particularly the auto-tweeted ones). Yet, when you see twenty feet of them, there’s something interesting about it.