I spent four nights on a cruise ship last week. For a couple of reasons I gave in to buy some Internet time. I wanted to post a daily blog entry on the trip, I had some important things I needed email for, and I sort of wanted to check in on twitter – mostly to promote the blog posts. So I bought 100 minutes to use over the four days. That’s 25 minutes a day total. It forced me to closely conceder what I was doing on the Internet.

The blog posts were easy. I drafted them using Windows Live Writer and then used but a few minutes to post them to the web and quickly check traffic and comments on previous posts. Email was also easy. While I was posting to the blog Outlook was downloading incoming email and uploading previously written replies and other messages. Likewise reading blogs, which I didn’t do a lot of, was also easy as RSS Bandit downloaded posts for later offline reading. But Twitter? Not so easy.

What I did first with Twitter was to post about my blog post – an addin handles that automatically.  I then quickly looked at Direct Messages and @ Replies so that I could quickly and briefly respond to those as appropriate. And maybe I scanned the most recent Tweets from the people I follow. But other than that Twitter was not something I could participate in as usual.

While blogging and email probably seemed as normal to most people I’m sure people could easily tell that I wasn’t Twittering much. Well if they were paying any attention at all – not a sure thing. But for me I felt like I was missing a lot. There was none of the usual conversations or casual banter I am used to on Twitter. I missed it all very much. I think I could easily handle rationing my online email and blogging activity but that is because there are tools for that. There is nothing to really gather a lot of Twitter traffic for reading and responding to while offline. Maybe a coding project for me? Could be but I need to find the time. Anyone know of something like this already out there?