Josh

I'm a developer in Melbourne, Australia, and co-founder of Hello Code.

Published Thu 26 February 2009

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Announcing Twitterscribe: archive your tweets

Update: Twitterscribe is now public. Anyone can sign up, so why not give it a go?

One of my resolutions this year was to deliver more of my side projects. Currently a lot of them are half-formed, either in idea or in function, and I wanted to change that by attempting to actually finish and make available whatever I start. So it is with a certain amount of glee that I announce my latest effort, Twitterscribe.

Twitterscribe is a pretty damn basic service: It archives what you tweet. That's it. Born from a tweet by Warlach, I thought it would be a great idea to give people the facility to save and output their tweets to CSV, so they have their own copy they can save/analyse/whatever. Brad Kellett has a similar utility, but it doesn't currently appear to be working. Also, Twitterscribe was built to overcome another flaw of Twitter's — the inability to go back in time past a certain point. Brad's tool output as much as it could, but couldn't go past Twitter's prescribed limit. Twitterscribe aims to circumvent this by archiving your tweets every day, so that in the future you will have a copy of things that Twitter officially can no longer show you.

Currently Twitterscribe has the bare minimum of functionality: you sign up, it archives your tweets every night, and whenever you like you can login and export a CSV file of what's stored.

So what's next?

There are a few different places to go with the service once reasonable archives have been built up:

  • Stats: Create some nifty stats tracking things like happiness over time, frequency of other things over time, etc. However a lot of Twitter stats sites exist already.
  • Search: Allow users to search back through their tweets by date or other criteria. This could potentially be useful.
  • More output: This is my favourite idea — let users create some pretty output from their tweets. I would love to be able to provide the facility for a user to order a custom printed book, like a journal of their tweets. It would be great to look back in a few years and know what you were doing and thinking about at a particular time.

I hope to work towards getting some more of this functionality happening, barring any big bugs appearing in the private beta.

Let me know if you have any other thoughts on functionality you'd like to see.

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