I think your break was over 5 minutes ago

Just to continue my frustrated post about Internet workflow, let me describe my current Twitter problem. This promises to be a really boring, personal anecdote with little to know application to you.

I'm trying to turn some of my twitter updates into blog posts. I've got a WordPress plugin to grab the tweets. Great. But I don't want to grab every tweet, because then conversation tweets that are out of context will be grabbed. But I don't want to edit the "spontaneity" of twitter, either.

So I got a 2nd twitter account that will be the "instant blog post" account. Now I can cross-post the tweets I want to go to the blog, and keep the boring ones on the big boring feed.

But how to cross-post? TweetDeck for iPhone works great. Type the tweet, and activate the buttons for which accounts you want the message to go to. But TweetDeck for Desktop gums up my works. First, Adobe Air takes a lot of resources on my old computer. Second, I like to do everything I can in the browser (one "minimize" clears the screen. Tabs are great.)

I keep an instance of TwitterGadget going in my iGoogle page, which is a collection of frames with similar little web apps. The nice thing is that it automatically updates itself. But it can't handle multiple accounts, or log in multiple instances on the same page.

No good Twitter extensions for Chrome that I can find, and certainly none that allow multiple accounts.

So here I am, with a Twitter problem that no one has invented a solution for yet. But is my problem even really a problem? Well, no. If it was a popular problem, someone would have come up with a solution.

But this IS the problem. The workflow of the Internet revolves around helping the majority of people do the things that the majority of people would like to do. Is my need to turn tweets into blogposts in the way I want a crucial task for humanity? Of course not. And if I even thought it was a bit innovative, I might learn enough programming to do it myself. But I won't, and so here I stay, in the same Twitter rut. Which is fine. But this is not good workflow for a "manufacturing environment", if that is what I think I'm doing with all these little witticisms and links to photos of bridges and stuff.

I guess the productive environment of writing, art, and other communicative arts have never really had any manufacturing form, as it were. Certain formal skill sets yes, but because it is largely an individual practice there's been no need for assembly line dynamics. Maybe this is changing? Post-human-individual writing is definitely going to need a line. And a union. Otherwise humanity is going to treat their artist-components the way artists treat their livers. Whether the Internet qualifies as sufficiently post-individual or not is still not resolved.