The previous three posts have all my Twitter activity from 2008-9, 2010, and 2011. Not all of the tweets have to do with It's Pub Night or with beer, but the Twitter account is mostly an extension of the blog. It's not a place where I interact with family or work colleagues, and not very seriously with the few friends who are connected on Twitter.
This post has links to what I tweeted and analyzes when, who, where, and how I tweeted. The only unanswered question is WHY?
When I was actively blogging, I got very annoyed by blogs that were more about blogging than about their supposed subjects. I'm not sure how I would have reacted to these posts which just hash and rehash blogging and tweeting done years ago. In my defense, one reason I started a blog was to document the current moment, for the benefit of readers in the future, and this furthers that ideal. I will put the tweet archives for 2012-2022 on separate pages to keep them out of the blog post stream.
It's been fun to look over the Twitter archive and remember what was happening 10-15 years ago. While extracting, timestamping, linkifying, and ordering the tweets, I gathered some statistics about them that may or may not be interesting.
Activity
I was never a very prolific tweeter, and it has really fallen off in recent years. The archive I downloaded contains 9230 total tweets. Here are the yearly totals:
- 2008: 25
- 2009: 797
- 2010: 1347
- 2011: 1847
- 2012: 1333
- 2013: 1092
- 2014: 723
- 2015: 307
- 2016: 357
- 2017: 526
- 2018: 342
- 2019: 141
- 2020: 157
- 2021: 146
- 2022: 89
Friday July 25, 2014 05:02 PMActually I can't remember if I started that or if Wallace did. Anyway, some of the statistics below could be skewed a little by retweets, though the big picture is accurate.RT @BarackObama Thanks dude! RT @halfbipolar 9:15 RT @BarackObama Hey @halfbipolar What time does pillowfight play at the Hawthorne Theater?
People
Another fun thing about this project was to look back at who the beer Twitter/Portland Twitter characters were at that time. Some are still active; some have lost interest or quit drinking; some I now realize I did not know at all and have no way to begin tracking them down. A few have passed away and are dearly missed.
In the early days you could make IRL friends that you first met on Twitter. I don't think that happens much anymore, thanks to the algorithms.
All told, I mentioned or replied to or retweeted 1131 unique user IDs. I mentioned my wife once, and each daughter three times. I wasn't connected on Twitter to any other family members, and absolutely no one at work. Here are the top people I tweeted to or mentioned in tweets:
- SamuraiArtist: 589
- Beervana: 268
- jwall4: 144
- AGSHender: 143
- UrbanBeerHiker: 143
- NewSchoolBeer: 136
- JfwellsPDX: 122
- itspubnight: 118
- brewpublic: 115
- HumuloneRed: 115
- socialretard: 113
- ConOat: 112
- beerinator: 101
- TracyTThomas: 95
- turbodog: 92
- SnobRitch: 91
- Notteham: 83
- bikeportland: 72
- rojasburke: 71
- TheBeermongers: 66
Man I miss UrbanBeerHiker. Though I did see him 4 years ago, about a year or so after he ditched Twitter.
Technology
At first most of my tweets were done via text message, which was actually a pretty common way to tweet back then, if you recall. I would also get text messages if someone mentioned me, or if selected people tweeted anything. It took a while before I sent a few pictures to Twitter via text message. Here are the various ways my tweets arrived on the platform:
- Yoono (2010-2014): 3141
- Twitter Web Client (2008-2018): 1922
- Plus 19 tweets from Twitter "Mobile Web"
- Plus 70 tweets from "Twitter Web App" -- how is this different?
- 54 of those are from 2022 after TweetCaster stopped working
- TweetCaster for Android (2014-2022): 1832
- Twitter SMS (2008-2015): 1505
- Plus 98 "MMS" tweets (picture attached)
- Also 3 text tweets while I was at a show at Dante's in 2016 (???)
- Also 1 text tweet in 2018 from a plane on the runway in India
- Echofon (2010-2011): 463
- Twitpic (2010-2012): 81
- Instagram (2017-2018): 43
- Beermapping.com (2009-2011): 28
- twitterfeed (2009-2010): 12
- Supposed to automate tweeting of new blog posts, but more work than simply tweeting them myself.
- Twitter for Android (2014, 2022): 6
- Twitter for Websites (2011, 2013-2014): 6
About 17% of my tweets were via text message. Another 22% were typed into the Twitter webpage. In 2010 I discovered browser plugins that made reading and posting to Twitter better: first Echofon, then yoono. 40% of my tweets were with these plugins, and now I can't remember a thing about how I used them. In 2014 I got my first smartphone, and quickly discovered that third-party apps are much better than Twitter's own app: 1) no advertisements or promoted tweets; 2) they give you the tweets in order, not according to Twitter's stupid algorithms; 3) you can temporarily mute people or subjects. I used TweetCaster for about 20% of my tweets until it abruptly stopped working in 2022.
#Hashtags
I am not a great hashtagger. There are less than 500 hashtags in my tweets, and 158 were from trying to cross-post to Facebook without having to log onto it. Another 48 were from the #ontappdx days of Taplister, back when Twitter was about more than Twitter. Here are my top 20 hashtags:
- fb: 158
- OBF: 50
- ontappdx: 48
- PDX: 43
- gabf: 41
- freshhop: 38
- craftbeer: 29
- pdxbeer: 28
- pedalpalooza: 25
- BBC11: 21
- beer: 15
- ff: 15
- SundayParkways: 15
- SBWF: 14
- freshhops: 13
- haf2011: 13
- pdxbeergeeks: 10
- hrhops12: 8
- rimshot: 8
- sampletraystunt: 8
Links
Below is the list of sites I linked to the most on Twitter. A lot of the links in my tweets are obscured by link shorteners. For this list, I replaced as many of them as possible with the true targets, though that is heavily skewed towards posts on its-pub-night.com itself. The pdx.be and nblo.gs shorteners are defunct, so those 63 links are not knowable. Some t.co and bit.ly links couldn't be found for some reason, or maybe they pointed to other t.co or bit.ly URLs (my process of tracing the links is not exhaustive). The twitter.com links are often modern quote tweets, not real interesting links. Still, the list gives you a pretty good picture of where I linked to:
- twitter.com: 603
- its-pub-night.com: 585
- bmap.us: 311
- twitpic.com: 146
- newschoolbeer.com: 62
- pdx.be: 53
- instagram.com: 50
- bit.ly: 39
- t.co: 38
- beervana.blogspot.com: 24
- youtu.be: 17
- oregonlive.com: 16
- blog.oregonlive.com: 15
- brewpublic.com: 15
- youtube.com: 15
- maps.google.com: 14
- imageshack.com: 13
- nblo.gs: 10
- thenewschoolbrewblog.blogspot.com: 10
- portlandbeer.org: 9
- bikeportland.org: 8
- anearforbeer.blogspot.com: 7
- beerpulse.com: 7
- facebook.com: 7
- flickr.com: 7
- urbanbeerhikes.com: 7
- wweek.com: 7
- beeradvocate.com: 6
- beeronomics.blogspot.com: 6
- google.com: 6
- notsoprofessionalbeer.com: 6
- nytimes.com: 6
- web.archive.org: 6
- apintfordionysus.wordpress.com: 5
- dontdrinkbeer.com: 5
- examiner.com: 5
- i.imgur.com: 5
- pdxbrewtunes.blogspot.com: 5
- thebrewsite.com: 5
Preserving History
This exercise seems like a way to further the historical preservation goal mentioned at the beginning of this post. It also shows how fragile documents can be, even in the Internet age. For a while I used a link shortener called pdx.be, which seemed really cool because you could make custom links like "pdx.be/erReviewMaker", but it went offline at some point and took all the links with it. Even if a shortened link still exists, the website it points to may be gone, or may have reorganized their content. Some tinyurl.com links to new It's Pub Night posts now fail, though others succeed. Other information is lost when tweets are replies to someone else's tweet, but Twitter can't find the original. Everything can combine to leave tantalizing mysteries like:
Thursday October 15, 2009 10:40 AM@rpFactotum That's awesome and too bad at the same time. Happened last night? http://bit.ly/3jzqAD
The username "@rpFactotum" is no longer valid on Twitter, the tweet being replied to can't be found, and the bit.ly link points to content that has vanished or been renamed. Wish I knew what this bad awesome thing was that happened the night of Oct. 14, 2009.
I fixed whatever broken links in these tweets pointed back into It's Pub Night. In terms of broken links in the blog itself, if you're lucky the Wayback Machine will have preserved the original links. For example, San Francisco vs. Portland from 2010 links to two paintings in the SFMOMA collection which are uniform gray rectangles, but now in 2023 the links are broken. The archived page at the Wayback Machine has links that correctly point to an archived version of the museum website, so you can see what I was carping about. With that in mind, here are snapshots of It's Pub Night for the busiest years, so that hopefully you could navigate to links which are broken today:
