I Used to Like Twitter

I was a fairly early Twitter adopter.  I had a Twitter account long before I had a Facebook account.  I think as someone who did a personal blog the micro-blogging aspect of Twitter was appealing to me.  I never really worried about how many followers I had, it was just fun to be able to bring my particular brand of snark to the masses.  As a sarcastic curmudgeon the quip is one of my strong suits.  Twitter very much played to my strengths.

There used to be this service called LoudTwitter that would aggregate one day's worth of Twitter posts and post them to a blog.  This was something that seemed tailor made for me and lead first to the "Shorties" posts on this blog - right up until the service disappeared.  Later it supported the "140 Characters or Less..." posts when the service returned - right up until the service disappeared again.  I keep wondering if there's some way to recreate this functionality myself using IFTTT and Google Sheets.  I wonder about it a lot, but not enough to try to solve it.  I should look to see if IFTTT has a community where you can suggest recipes for someone else to write.

I used to have my Twitter feed linked to my Facebook feed so that whenever I posted to Twitter it echoed the post to Facebook.  Recently as part of tightening their privacy and security setup Facebook disabled this functionality.  It looks like they've disabled any third party posting functionality.

A significant amount of my tweeting used to be about work.  Each time after class I would tweet out what we'd done that day, things like "Technical Direction 3 - Transportation Protection."  I liked doing that primarily as alumni outreach on Facebook.  The tweet would crosspost to Facebook and then occasionally former students would have something to say about that day's content.  I'm not sure why, but without the crossposting element I've found that I've stopped putting the content on Twitter.  Beyond that, I could just put that content directly on Facebook, but I don't want to.  I have no idea why not.  It almost feels petulant, like I am refusing to adapt to the new landscape purely out of stubborness.  (Even stupider, Twitter allows third party posting such that I could easily implement an IFTTT recipe to crosspost a Facebook entry to Twitter.  But I'm not gonna.  Can't make me.)

As a result of the changes my Twitter activity has dropped to almost zero and my Facebook activity has been reduced to mostly posting web articles from Feedly.  I'm really in a position where I could, probably, just drop both services and not miss them much.  Maybe I should.