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:

1 month of tweets (Little 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:

1 month of tweets

1 month of tweets

Another perspective comes from hanging it from the ceiling:

1 month of tweets

Here's a close-up of a tweet:

1 month of tweets

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.


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