I’ll go out on a limb here: Twitter “tweets” are the Schrödinger’s cats of Internet phenomena. In general, they exist or do not exist as long as you ignore Twitter altogether; when you actively pay attention, though, each tweet instantly crystallizes into a state of aliveness (Whoa, How about that, Ha!, or Hmm…) or death — forgotten at once. (My own experience indicates that tweets, on average, have a half-life of about two-thirds of a second before the inevitable decay into memes, interstitials, youtubes, and other elementary particles.)

So I haven’t enthusiastically leapt aboard the USS Twitter yet. Life’s too ephemeral as it is, y’know? That said, I do like seeing what others get out of (and sometimes put into) it.

For example, there’s Jon, of the newly (to me) discovered Ransom Note Typography blog (subtitle: “Discontinue Use If Rash Develops”). In a late-December post, Jon exhaustively documents his favorite tweets from 2008. After a brief introduction describing his criteria for selection, he lays out his month-by-month catalog of several tweets per month.

Here’s a small sample:
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