Twitter is a web service to help answer the question What are you doing? The service was born in March of 2006 and I first used it in November of the same year. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to say goodbye to Twitter.

Before Twitter existed I started using what most sites call asides as a way to post short little updates to my blog. I call these Quickies. I never stopped posting Quickies and I’ll be using them as my Twitter replacement.

Quick Updates

One of Twitter’s strengths is how easy it is to post updates. Twitter provides ways to post updates through their web site, using SMS text messages, and through instant messages. Through the use of the Twitter API many other services have been created to update your account. PocketTweets and Hahlo are a couple of iPhone web apps I’ve used to interact with my Twitter account, but there are many more.

In order to stop using Twitter, I needed a quick way to post updates. Using the normal post screen in WordPress, I’d have to type a title and select my Quickie category in addition to typing the update and clicking the Publish button. Yesterday I found Wphone, which is a lightweight admin interface designed for phones, and was able to customize it to suit my needs.

As you can see from the screenshot, my Quickie post screen is pretty limited. The title gets automatically filled with date and time appended to “Quickie: “. I can type in the content and any tags and then click the Publish button. The category is automatically set to Quickie and the comment and ping statuses are set to the blog’s default settings. I was even able to get the interface to work with the WordPress bookmarklet, which takes the page title and url of the web page you are browsing and applies them to the appropriate fields. In the current form, I can’t release my customizations for others to use, but if there is interest I will see what I can come up with.

Notifications

Another strength of Twitter is the notification and follow system. Following someone is basically setting them as a friend on Twitter. You will see their updates, choose how you wish to get notified, and can reply to their updates.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve always visited Twitter to read updates from the people I follow. Yesterday I finally subscribed to the RSS feed of the people I follow. Any updates will get shipped to me and I have one less web site to visit. If I want to reply to someone’s update I’ll still use Twitter for that. People can reply to my Quickie posts by posting comments on my web site.

Content Ownership

By using Twitter, you’re at their mercy. If the service goes down, you can’t access your updates. Anyone who has used Twitter, knows that the service goes down quite a bit.

When you use Twitter, your content is stored on their servers and everyone visits twitter.com (or another site through the use of the API) to access your data. By choosing to use my WordPress Quickie category, all of updates are stored in mySQL with the rest of my web site. I’m also in full control of replies (comments). People either visit my site or subscribe to my RSS feeds to access the information.

Will I Miss Twitter?

I honestly don’t think so. My primary use of Twitter was always to post quick updates. I’ve replaced that functionality and made it extremely easy to use. I won’t be limited to 140 character updates and I can use HTML in my updates. I’m in full control of my content and don’t have to rely on a web service.

This won’t be the right choice for most people using Twitter, but I don’t see it being a problem for me.