It was twitter‘s fifth birthday last week, which means that I’ve been there for almost five years now.

My feelings about it are summed up by Ryan Mickle in his post When free makes your product suck:

I realized that Twitter is turning the corner from a beloved, worry-about-making-money-later company into a just-barely-tolerable advertising machine.

So I’m looking for a way out. I don’t care that much about posting new tweets (that’s just a bad habit), but keeping up with some interesting people (oh, and the team at work) is something I’d like to do.

A little while ago I set up a local version of Tweet Nest, which is a fairly simple backup of the content you post to your twitter account. It was easy to install and works fine for just keeping a backup of what I’m saying.

ThinkUp is a more advanced version of the same idea; it keeps what I’m saying but, according to the site and this brief review, everything else as well. A one-stop twitter-backup solution including threaded replies, graphs of followers and a summary of all the links that people have tweeted. I’m fairly tempted to install this and start using it as my primary interface to a read-only twitter.

Will twitter miss me? Probably not. Will I miss out on contributing to conversations? Probably. Am I OK with that? Absolutely.