twitliterati of the world, unite

Those of you who spend time with Twitter have probably come to appreciate, as I have, the little poetic touch, elegant turn of phrase or razor sharp observation that occasionally emerges from the normal flow of comments, ripostes and links.

For me, the first time I realized how startling a 140-word post could be was when I ran across this, from Xeni Jardin:

Eating homemade tortillas y frijoles revueltos in a small town in Guatemala. The morning smells like hearth smoke and mountain fog.

Others, it turns out, have had similar revelations. For Tom Watson, this tweet was the one that did it:

Driving down to West Cork used to be a quiet pleasure.
Now it’s a melancholy chore.
Still, the sky is absolutely full of stars.

So I was thinking how cool it would be if there were a way to aggregate just the good literary bits from Twitter. Just the ones that really pop.

Then my friend Jeff Jarvis launched his little nanoreview experiment TwitCrit, and that was all the prompting I needed.

The result? twitliterati

All it needs now is you. Feeling inspired? Just address your tweets to @twiliterati and they’ll show up on the site.

I don’t imagine a lot of people will jump on this, but wouldn’t it be fun if they did?

(Note: Following Jeff’s advice, I used RSS from terraminds to feed tumblr, then fed the tumblelog RSS back to Twitter through twitterfeed. Surely there’s a simpler way to do this with the Twitter API. Even better would be a bookmarklet  that allowed me to submit someone else’s tweet… Any suggestions?)