by EntAllat » Wed Nov 06, 2013 4:50 pm
A few of you may be wondering whatever happened with this. Three things:
1) Twitter's API changes.
Twitter's API changes have effectively killed all the Twitter clients the TwitterFic members used to use. Those clients were really necessary in order to keep up and manage the illusion of multiple characters interacting at the same time; trying to use multiple browser windows just doesn't work. While there are still a few that work (Hootsuite and Tweetdeck being the best of them) the interface is very different than what worked best for staging a complicated, sequential event with multiple accounts in real time. Some of Twitter's discussion threading also does weird and funky things to the way the character's conversations appear in a timeline.
The up-side is that Hootsuite (and possibly Tweetdeck) allow for scheduled tweets, which is exactly what we're trying to do in "re-tweeting" the previous stories. )The drawback is that it'll actually cost some $$s to upgrade to the professional version in order to do what we used to do.) A little experimentation may reveal how best to deal with the new aspects of Twitter (like threaded discussions) to best re-tell the stories, so there's hope. Unfortunately, that leads to #2:
2) "Real Life"
There's a fair amount of work that needs to go into the next step, and there hasn't been a lot of time to make it happen. The stories are sequential, so the re-telling needs to start at the beginning, and that beginning needs some work before it can go live, since we didn't really know what we were doing when all this first started. There's also some programming (actual coding) or scripting that needs to happen once the story is ship-shape. An then there's the experimenting with the new clients and features, etc. to get it right.
On top of all that, RL has been so crazy lately that I haven't even had time to tweet casually lately from my RL account, much less from the characters.
3) Wondering if it's worth it.
Really. The Twitter audience and landscape has changed so much since we started in 2008, that I'm not entirely sure if this is worth the effort. So, in the meantime, while I try to find some time to work on that beginning and coding, I'm re-thinking the effort and putting some more energy into the prose version of the stories for the DE archive.
Of course, I'll update here if and when this moves forward.