Could you do Twitter via the mail? That's the question writer Giles Turnbull posed (on Twitter), then went on to literally post his tweets by post, or snail mail:
"Twitter is the contemporary postcard — social updates that are limited by size, but not imagination. For a month, with a billion stamps, our correspondent moved his tweets from the laptop to the post office, and rediscovered the joy of mail," says The Morning News, an online magazine, which shared photos of Turnbulls' effort.
Why would you do Twitter via the mail? Well, Turnbull has a fondness for the post of the past, letters he says, that were once frequently sent, and not automatically long by nature, but shorter — just like Twitter and its 140-character limit on tweets.
"The mechanics" of his project "took a while to work out" he writes:
Most difficult was replicating my personal Twitter timeline — how could I post the same thing to everyone? Well, by writing it out lots of times.
For those “public” tweets, I wrote the same thing out 15 times, on 15 cards, and sent them to 15 different people. This took every moment as long as you might think; possibly a little longer.
My wonderful collaborators were asked to do more than simply receive my ramblings through their letterboxes. I also asked them to reply with cards of their own.
The chain reaction was very gratifying to Turnbull, who said that his front door became his "timeline. The sound of the postman (or postwoman, in my case) pushing cards through the letterbox became the equivalent of the little “DING” your Twitter client makes when you have new messages. Like Pavlov’s dog, I began to associate the sound of the postwoman’s approach with the arrival of new, unusually personal messages. I’d get jumpy with excitement, and rush out to the hall the moment they’d been delivered."
Getting mail "was fun again." And Turnbull's not done with his "mod" of social media. Next up on his list? He shared his plans in a tweet:
— Via TheNextWeb
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