My Status Diary Experiment
I once regularly kept a week-at-a-glance diary much like this one. I still have ones from high school stacked in my attic and there’s no way I’d throw them out. What once formed most of the content of my diaries is now scattered in many places online but is best captured by my status updates in Twitter and Facebook.
I wondered how it would look to copy in my Tweets and Facebook statuses into a week-at-a-glance diary.
Thanks to it being August, I bought a very cheap one today and picked a random week to add entries for.
This is how one page looked:
There was something strangely really fulfilling about manually copying in my Facebook and Twitter updates onto paper. In this rapid-paced world, it’s not often we take time to reflect on things gone past and re-enjoy little recent memories. I left out a few tweets which were links or things which didn’t have long-term value to me – but the process of filtering these out too was not a chore. I was surprised at how much I wanted to continue with copying them in. My status updates really were an important record I cared about keeping – not just something I found value in as-it-happened.
I began thinking: why couldn’t this process be done automatically on a large scale? Not everyone has the time nor energy to do this sort of conversion.
Here’s how it could work:
- You enter your Twitter/Facebook/Google Calendar/… login information
- You optionally upload a sample of your handwriting (my husband says he’d hate to see things in his handwriting and would prefer it typed)
- You filter out the things you don’t want to keep a permanent record of (e.g. reply Tweets, Tweets with URLs)
- The application figures out the appropriate type of diary for you depending on the number of status updates that you do (one page per day/week/month)
- You get sent a printed diary for your past year in your own handwriting (or chosen font).
Would this be an amazing gift to give someone for Christmas – and get sent a few weeks later?
(And aside from your own diary, you could buy diaries for other people – like Miley Cyrus’ diary…)
That would be so, so cool. I’d like that – and you have REALLY neat handwriting!!!!!
Thank you! I say that I have schizophrenic handwriting – I can write in so many styles, depending on my mood or other people’s styles I’ve just seen.
I think there’s something really organic and beautiful about seeing it in your own handwriting – even if it’s not the tidiest style. We use handwriting less and less… and the mundane looks more interesting in your own style.
That is a very very cool idea, I know so many people who would do this. If I was you I would copyright it asap!
If my handwriting wasn’t so bad, then yes! Definitely need an “arial” option
This is an incredible idea! We all go through so many moods, experiences, etc., in a year. It would make very interesting reading. I think it would cause people to make more use of their status updates too. An excellent family heirloom for generations to come, not to mention adding to historical records. I’d definitely use an app like that.
I still have handwritten diaries from about the last 15 years or so and some of the things I’ve written are scary, not to mention hilariously funny! I’ve never thought of copying my status updates into my diary though – might try it and see how it looks!
What a fantastic idea.
I think the starting point would be to have an application that would do this automatically – by supplying login details – and having the application capture the updates. I can wait for the handwriting and variations of types of diaries.
I really think such an application would really take off.
i like the idea — but i would be very happy with a record which is just in regular type. It seems one should be able to do this with facebook APIs.. The handwriting thing is a plus of course…
I’m currently testing out a Facebook application to pull out past statuses, you can read about it here. Weirdly, I can only pull out 631 status updates – trying to figure out what the pattern is.
I actually wrote off to the anonymous FaceBook “suggestions” team last year about doing just this. It struck me that so many life-changing things have happened to me in the last couple of years that having this in written form – along with the comments that go with – would be absolutely amazing. I was about to, like you, work my way back years and copy/paste the lot, but I chickened out!
Please, please please come to our rescue!