There is no doubt that Twitter is an extremely valuable and powerful tool. It is not only a medium for communication, it is also at the forefront of the real-time web. In fact, some would even, arguably, claim that Twitter started the whole real-time craze.
A lot of people use Twitter to share little 140 character snippets of their daily life with their friends and family and there are others who just use Twitter to get the latest news, in real-time. And in these varied usage patterns lies the beauty of Twitter. The service by itself is so basic and simple that almost everyone who uses it has a different take on it.
But, one thing that most people would agree on is that the Twitter search service is most likely the best indicator of global trends and it is a pity that Twitter keeps an index worth only about 1.5 weeks on it’s servers ! Yes, you heard that right, 1-and-half weeks. So, if you tweet something today, 1.5 weeks later, no one will be able search for it. Yes, the Tweet will still be visible to you in your time-line but anyone who doesn’t know you, will not be able to use Twitter search to search for your tweet.
Given this limitation, it is only natural that several third party services have sprung up to fill the void and among them, here are 5 of our favorites.
Twapper Keeper
Twapper Keeper is an online tool that is very interesting because it mimics the way a lot of people (like me) use Twitter search using hash tags.
Twapper Keeper lets you specify a hash tag and then searches Twitter for any occurrence of the hash tag and saves those tweets for you.
A very useful tool if you want to read all tweets about, say, a conference. Just create a new Archive with the relevant hash tag and wait for Twapper Keeper to bring you all the tweets with that tag.
Twistory
As Twitter goes mainstream more and more people are realizing the importance of having a life-stream of your Twitter activities. A database that you can refer to that’ll tell you what you tweeted and when. Twistory provides that service.
Twistory is a service that indexes your time-line and gives you a webcal feed that you can subscribe to in Outlook or iCal.
TweetBackup
TweetBackup is probably the simplest Twitter backup service around. The only thing that you have to do is authorize them using your Twitter credentials and they’ll do the rest. Not only do they backup your tweets to their servers, they also let you export them out in CSV, RSS, Text or HTML format. It doesn’t get any simpler than this.
Do you guys backup what you tweet ? Would you like to create an archive of all your tweets and conversations that you’ve had over the years ?
Programmer, blogger and a geek making a living shifting bits around the Internet. Sharninder is the owner of Geeky Ninja
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I like twitter and I like to follow people, especially celebs. But it is really strange why you can´t read msgs written more then 1,5 weeks ago.
But otherwise, sometimes I am wondering where internet provider get my data when I have deleted some accs on different social network pages.
But anyways I like twirtter :D
cheers
Frank
Well, the data is still there with Twitter, they just don’t keep it in their search index and so you can’t search for it.