The problem is that Twitter doesn’t retain more than 2500 of your last tweets. This that old information un-indexable by search engines, un-searchable by Twitter’s own search engine, and essentially irretrievable unless somebody retained a link or has archived the tweet. In the case where you might want to say something that is more persistent, a new method is necessary.

The second problem is that Blogs such as WordPress have post pages that usually contain some sort of information about the site being referenced. Posting a Blog that is simply a link to another site is pretty bland without some sort of summary or excerpt from the hyperlink being pointed to. I really don’t want to make my reader load that extra page, or force them to read some lame summary when I’m just trying to share a link I already summarized in the title.

These are the use cases I’d like to see:

• The “Post Title” inside the WordPress dashboard would be where you could enter your short message which you would like to be persistent. Ideally this would be built to behave much like Twitter’s “What’s happening?” or Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” field.
• If you post with a blank post body, then a tweet/status update would be sent out containing exactly what you put in the post title. There would be no hyperlink to the post page, the post page would not exist.
• If you post with a URL in the post body, but nothing else, then the Post Page would turn into a 301 redirect to the URL that was put inside the post body.
• If you post with more than a URL in the post body, then the everything would  behave like an ordinary post.

There are some complicating factors:

• RSS feeds always have URLs in them, can these be left blank without upsetting the RSS client? Right now I’m using RSS Graffiti which post links.  Is there a better way to automate the addition of Link free status updates to Facebook?
• URL shortening is tricky, you might to augment your URL shortener plugin (such as YOURLS wordpress to Twitter) in order to leave the link off of postless blog post.

I haven’t looked for a plugin that does exactly this, but if I can find one, I’ll update this post to include it here.  If I can’t find one, maybe I’ll write it myself some day.