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WGBH in Boston asked me to send them stories about Tweleted to PBS' Digital Nation. The trouble is, I don't have stories from it - or from most of the things I've made recently. The reason why, though, is just as interesting.

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Transcript

Hi, I’m Tom Scott, and a couple of weeks ago I made a site called Tweleted. There’s a bug in Twitter, the micro-blog service, which means that messages that users delete are still visible if you know what you’re doing. Tweleted makes the recovery process a lot easier and a bit more public. Suddenly what was a known but mostly ignored problem became, well, a fairly big thing.

So, PBS’s Digital Nation emailed me and said, "you must have some good stories to tell about this". And well, a couple of people have got in touch with me and asked if there’s a way to really delete their messages — and I’ve said they should talk to Twitter, and explained that, honestly, there’s nothing I can do. Even if I take Tweleted down, someone else will put the same thing up — or else, people can just run the same search manually. All the site does is make the process faster.

But I don’t have the good stories. And there’s a reason for that: it’s because no-one tells me about them. That’s a new thing.

I’ve been putting stuff up on the web for more than ten years now. And back then, my hair was a lot shorter, my voice was a bit higher, and the word blog hadn’t even been coined, let alone micro-blogging. Dial-up internet was still the standard. Social networking was Classmates.com.

I’m 24 years old, and I sound like I’m ancient.

Here’s the thing: back then, people emailed me their stories.

Years ago, when I made something and it went popular — whether it was a cartoon about a skiing penguin, or a mickey-take of a government site — I’d get messages about it. And I can look back on those now and read them again, because I can archive email. There’s a standard format to keep them in, and as long as I keep backups they’ll stay intact indefinitely. I can tell you stories from years ago.

But I haven’t got stories about Tweleted.

I mean, sure, I can tell people are interested. I can see how many people are visiting, and I can read the tweets and vanity-search the site name if I want. But now people don’t send messages to say they like something: they go and talk about it in their own space, on their blogs, via Twitter, via Facebook. Even @replies — I only get a couple. I can tell you how many people have retweeted messages about my site... but I can’t tell you their stories. Because their stories are wrapped up behind the walled garden of Facebook, trapped in inboxes that they can’t archive, or condensed into 140 character messages.

Email’s for businesspeople now. It’s for Blackberries and Microsoft Exchange, used for formal writing and messages to say you’ve been downsized. And that’s a shame. Because when the social networks that are popular today get abandoned — and they will, sooner or later, the same way that plan files have gone — all the conversations, all the connections, all the stories that are in them will just... vanish.