James Bridle publishes two years of his tweets in a hardcover book


If you’ve used Twitter for any length of time, eventually it probably occurs to you: Hmmm, this lifestream is a pretty weird record of my life, isn’t it? A zillion little things that happen to you, random stray thoughts, links of things you were looking at: A pointillist memoir, as it were. Every tiny piece seems daft or meaningless, but — as I’ve written in my articles about Twitter/Facebook before — when you add them all up you get a curiously rich sense of someone’s existence.

So I was tickled to see that James Bridle has taken this conceit to the extreme — by publising two years worth of his tweets as a hardcover book. He hoovered them out of Twitter using a custom script, designed it nicely, and sent it to Lulu.com to be printed up! As he notes:

When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.

I love it: Backing up your tweets by turning them into a printed novel! Given the way Ma.gnolia went poof in January — this idea might not be as idiosyncratic as it sounds, eh?

There’s a picture of the cover of the book after the jump!


(Thanks to Britta Gustafson for this one!)


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I'm Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better (Penguin Press). You can order the book now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powells, Indiebound, or through your local bookstore! I'm also a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. Email is here or ping me via the antiquated form of AOL IM (pomeranian99).

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