class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/twitter.jpg" border="0" alt="twitter as a diary" />While
href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/twitter/">Twitter is all about social networking, conversations and sharing your thoughts with your followers, it can also be a great way to document what you’re doing throughout the day. That said, you don’t want to bore your followers with every detail of your day, and one of the first rules anyone will tell you about Twitter is not to tweet about what you eat. But if you want to keep track of your eating habits, your errands, or just about anything that happens to you throughout the day, there’s a service that will let you do just that using Twitter – but privately.
Below are 5 suggestions on how you can use Twitter as a diary. These are ways you can use Twitter or use Twitter-like services to keep a private microblog, saving your thoughts, or daily experiences online for posterity.
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Tweet What You Eat!
href="http://www.tweetwhatyoueat.com/">Tweet What You Eat! (TWYE) is a free service that allows you to keep a food diary. Whether you’re on a diet, counting calories, or simply want to keep track of your eating habits. TWYE has you covered.
Signing up for a free account can be done by registering for a free account or you can register using your Facebook login.
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You will then need to link your TWYE account to your Twitter account, which will also automatically follow the
href="http://twitter.com/#!/twye">TWYE Twitter account.
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Once you’re logged in, you can begin to keep track of what you eat and your weight. Each food entry is accompanied by a description, the number of calories, date eaten and time. You also have the option of posting it to Facebook.
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Weight entries are accompanied by the date, time, weight and comments. While weight entries are technically in pounds, there’s no reason you can’t enter them in kilograms.
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If you’re wondering where the Twitter part is, you can add items on the go through Twitter, by DM’ing the information to the TWYE Twitter account. If you want to include the calorie count, be sure to use the following format:
Slice of Pizza:240
As you continue to add items to your log, TWYE will calculate the total number of calories per day, your average weight, and more.
While your entries are not made public on your Twitter profile, they are public on TWYE, on the “Recently Tweaten List”.
Tweet What You Spend
If you want to use Twitter as a spending diary, from the same people behind TWYE, comes
href="http://tweetwhatyouspend.com/">Tweet What You Spend (TWYS).
To register, you have to create a new account. Unlike TWYE you can’t register using your Facebook account, and for privacy issues that’s definitely better.
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The next step is to link your TWYS account with your Twitter account.
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You can then begin to keep track of your spending habits using TWYS. Information included with entries include date, time, item description and the amount spent.
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After you’ve added the item, you can drag and drop the item into the categories listed on the left-hand side of the screen, a list that is entirely editable.
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TWYS will also keep track of your average daily spending and you can export your spending journal to a CSV file.
Like TWYE, you can DM your expenses making it easy to make entries on the go. TWYS provides a
href="http://tweetwhatyouspend.com/howto#syntax">guide on how to formulate your entries. For example, if you want to include the amount, description and category use the following format:
Taxi 20 Transportation
If for any reason, TWYE or TWYS doesn’t auto-follow you once you’ve registered, you won’t be able to DM them, just mention it to them on Twitter and it should be resolved quickly.
Tweet Private
With
href="https://www.tweetprivate.com/">TweetPrivate, you can keep a private online diary of just about anything you want. You don’t have to register for a new account, just connect it to your Twitter account.
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You can then store private thoughts in your Tweet Private account.
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Not only can you store your private thoughts, you can also upload photos that will be kept private.
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To use Tweet Private on the go, log in from your phone on the
href="http://m.tweetprivate.com">mobile site and you can enter your rants and thoughts from anywhere. In addition to storing your thoughts, you can also check in on the
href="http://m.tweetprivate.com/map.php">online map. On your TweetPhoto account you can browse your personal tweets by date.
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Current
If you’d rather keep Twitter and your diary separate,
href="http://www.current.im/">Current offers an interesting alternative. It limits you to Twitter’s 140 character count, making it an ideal private microblog. Signing up for a new account requires a username, email address, password and time zone.
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You can then write one short diary entry entry per day.
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All entries will be displayed on your home page and are visible only to you.
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Private Twitter Account
Without a doubt, the easiest way to pull this off is to use a private Twitter account. With lots of third party Twitter apps, both mobile and desktop, supporting multiple accounts, all it takes to keep a private microblog is to open a new Twitter account.
Would you use Twitter to keep a private online journal? Do you have any tips or suggestions on how to use Twitter as a diary?
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