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Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

zachholman.com

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Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

#11

Post by arst »

Archival of 'cloud' data is an issue I've been thinking a lot about lately. People are putting so much of their lives on the internet these days without generally giving too much thought to permanence and availability. Twitter's only been around a few years and people are already running into retention issues. The tweet from the article will still be valuable 30 years from now - will twitter even be around then? Will all the tweets from the current system have been migrated to whatever tools we're using in the future?

I've been playing around with a project to locally archive a bunch of data sources that interest me (email, instant messaging logs, Twitter, SMS, some blog and social news comments) in a straightforward and open data format. Unfortunately this type of tool might be something that most people don't realize they need until it's too late.

Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

#12

Post by senko »

arst wrote: post #11

Archival of 'cloud' data is an issue I've been thinking a lot about lately. People are putting so much of their lives on the internet these days without generally giving too much thought to permanence and availability. Twitter's only been around a few years and people are already running into retention issues. The tweet from the article will still be valuable 30 years from now - will twitter even be around then? Will…

It's not local, and not in an open data format, and not free, but you might like http://www.backupify.com/, they have a nice list of services that they can back up for you (haven't used it, so wouldn't know how good they are in practice).

Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

#14

Post by rythie »

The library of congress has them, if we could get a copy we could index it all somewhere to re-construct a copy of people's early timelines http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acq...

I was thinking recently about getting all the tweets from 2006, it should be about 2 million tweets, so should be possible to fetch by sequentially walking through the ids.

Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

#16

Post by senko »

Yeah, this is a frequent pain point for a large number of users. If you search twitter for "how can I see my old tweets", there's thousands of people wanting that feature.

No wonder dozens of services (or even curl-based shell scripts or tutorials) are available to back up the tweets (shameless plug for my own http://sparrw.com/, which focuses on easy searching of past tweets and treating tweeted links as sort of auto-bookmarks, which is what I'm often using Twitter for).

But all this works only if you're quick enough, and set up some sort of backup system before the magic 3200 limit :(

Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

#17

Post by davidu »

bradleyjoyce wrote: post #8

This is precisely why I built http://tweetsaver.com ... I wanted a nice way to search through ALL my old tweets AND keep them around. I'm always retweeting awesome content, favoriting interesting things, and sometimes I just want to remember what I said without having to click MORE MORE MORE MORE for 100 pages to find it on twitter.com. Maybe someday Twitter will turn on a feature that kills my app, but for now I thi…

$120/year is not worth it to me. $10/year would be. Just my feedback. :-)

Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

#18

Post by avar »

bradleyjoyce wrote: post #8

This is precisely why I built http://tweetsaver.com ... I wanted a nice way to search through ALL my old tweets AND keep them around. I'm always retweeting awesome content, favoriting interesting things, and sometimes I just want to remember what I said without having to click MORE MORE MORE MORE for 100 pages to find it on twitter.com. Maybe someday Twitter will turn on a feature that kills my app, but for now I thi…

Please don't design your site so that I have to authorize my account and only then find out that I have to fork over $5 or $10 for the service (and de-authorize my account). Only a "Pricing" link in the top-right corner indicates that the site is behind a paywall.

Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

#19

Post by rythie »

davidu wrote: post #17
bradleyjoyce wrote: post #8

This is precisely why I built http://tweetsaver.com ... I wanted a nice way to search through ALL my old tweets AND keep them around. I'm always retweeting awesome content, favoriting interesting things, and sometimes I just want to remember what I said without having to click MORE MORE MORE MORE for 100 pages to find it on twitter.com. Maybe someday Twitter will turn on a feature that kills my app, but for now I thi…

$120/year is not worth it to me. $10/year would be. Just my feedback. :-)

You can run Tweetnest yourself http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/ so that's free, here's mine: http://tweets.rythie.com/ for example.

There are other solutions around if you look.

Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets

#20

Post by JimEngland »

Preservation of Twitter and other real-time services is definitely important, but not just for personal use. I'm also interested in viewing the tweet history of my friends, evolution of certain hash tags, etc.

My startup http://keepstream.com is involved in this real-time curation (Twitter now, more services later). I would love to chat with anyone interested in the subject; my contact information is in my profile.

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