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Twitter Users Can Finally Download and Save All Their Tweets

December 19, 2012 / Devon Glenn / No comments

Twitter has announced a new tool that lets users download, save, and search through every tweet they’ve uttered since the day they joined Twitter. This is a big deal. Historically, the microblogging site has been stingy with its tweet records.

PeopleBrowsr came close to creating a full archive in May 2012, when the social analytics company released an API that could surface Twitter records going all the way back to 2008. Intended for business use, the suite of tools pulled data from the Firehose, which contains tweets from all users.

When Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in a presentation at the University of Michigan in November that the company would have downloadable records by the end of the year, people didn’t believe it.

But he’s made good on his promise. The engineering team built the technology during one of its quarterly Hack Weeks and is slowly making it available to everyone, starting with English-speaking users.

That’s a lot of characters — Twitter reports that its users spew forth one billion tweets every two-and-a-half days.

Explained Twitter’s Mollie Vandor in a blog post:

Today, we’re introducing the ability to download your Twitter archive, so you’ll get all your Tweets (including Retweets) going back to the beginning. Once you have your Twitter archive, you can view your Tweets by month, or search your archive to find Tweets with certain words, phrases, hashtags or @usernames. You can even engage with your old Tweets just as you would with current ones.

Twitter’s archives go back “to the beginning” — which would be 2006 — and they’re aimed at the average user, one account at a time. (But that’s not to say that they couldn’t offer these insights to businesses as well.)

Readers: You’ll find the archives tool in your account settings. Not everyone has it just yet.

Image by Astronoman via Shutterstock.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Category: archive, download tweets, historical tweets, how to save tweets, News, Peoplebrowsr, Tips and How Tos, Tips and Tricks, twitter /

How to Automate Your Social Activities

March 29, 2012 / Corina Mackay / No comments

Are you looking to simplify management of your social activities? If so, then Ifttt is for you.

Don’t be put off by Ifttt’s crazy name. This is one handy tool that you should definitely know about.

Ifttt stands for “If this, then that,” which is a very basic way of explaining the site’s whole premise.

With very little effort on your part, Ifttt will connect your online accounts and services to create triggered events. After setting a trigger from one service, you can create a task to be activated automatically when the trigger goes off.

Ifttt lets us common people work with scary Internet codes like APIs without ever knowing it.

So for example, you might set an RSS feed of local news to trigger an event any time your hometown is mentioned. You can then create a task for Ifttt to perform when this trigger goes off, like sending you an email or text message. Neat, right? This is called a recipe.

Each recipe can be searched, shared and used by anyone on Ifttt.

Personally, I believe Ifttt is incredibly useful if you use it right. It’s one of those services with a lot of potential that could seem useless if you can’t find a need for it. Initially, this is exactly how I felt, but once I found a need for Ifttt, I realized how useful it can be.

Here are some examples of how Ifttt does do the drudgework for you and saves you time and energy.

Share Everywhere

If you manage multiple social media accounts, you’ll appreciate the ease of linking them together. With Ifttt, you can link up your accounts to perform particular actions automatically.

Linking one account to another will allow you to repost updates across different networks. If you only want to do this occasionally, you can create a hashtag to trigger the action.

For those who use Tumblr or a similar media-focused blog platform, Ifttt allows you to automatically post items from RSS feeds, creating a continual stream of shared content on your blog. You can also set your own blog’s RSS feed to automatically post updates on your social media accounts.

If you’re a fan of Buffer, you know how easy it is to add new updates. The process is even simpler with Ifttt, as you can set items starred or labeled with a particular tag to be sent to your Buffer account automatically.

Manage Social Media

Managing your social media accounts is more than just creating and sharing content. Ifttt can help you with administrative tasks such as monitoring and keeping your profiles up to date.

If you like to keep your profile pictures the same across different networks, you can set a trigger to activate when you change a picture on one account to update your other accounts to match.

Keep your profile pictures consistent across networks automatically.

Using Evernote, you can create an archive of your social media updates by sending them to your notebook as soon as they are posted. You can also archive them by date, posting them to your Google Calendar.

Keep your updates safe and searchable by archiving them in your Google Calendar.

If you want to keep track of links you’ve shared online, saving only your updates containing links will help you find them again later. Using Delicious or Evernote, you can keep a searchable archive of all your shared links.

Evernote is also a great place to keep blog post ideas. By setting a tag to send straight to your Evernote account, you can collect ideas from your Google Reader with ease.

Ifttt lets you search recipes for keywords like "calendar" or "Evernote" to save you the effort of setting up your tasks from scratch.

Organize Your Life

The automatic nature of Ifttt keeps you organized even when you’re not. Set these tasks up once and you’ll be surprised at how handy they become.

If you’re a fan of GTD, you can add labels to your Gmail messages to have them sent directly to your Evernote notebooks with tags added. This is handy for getting your to-do list out of your inbox without a lot of extra effort.

Keep track of favorite and important emails by sending them directly to your Evernote account.

Emails can also be used to create calendar events automatically by using labels, message contents or sender details.

One of my favorite uses of Ifttt is the automatic creation of Google Calendar entries according to your emails.

If you use Dropbox, Ifttt can simplify your backup processes by sending documents, pictures, email attachments and more straight to your account. You can also back up images by cross-posting them to different networks. For instance, you might repost all of your Instagram pictures to your Flickr account.

Backing up your photos is easy with all the recipes already available.

Easily my favorite use for Ifttt so far is weather and travel notifications. Ifttt has so many channels set up, you can set notifications to arrive via SMS, email, social networks or even a phone call. Creating a notification for travel delays on your train line or weather warnings in your area can save you time and energy (not to mention a bad hair day if it’s raining!).

Get weather alerts via text, phone calls, email or Twitter to prepare you for the day.

If you need a regular reminder for something, Ifttt can do this too, using the time and date as the trigger. SMS reminders every Monday to put out the garbage or an email on the first of every month to pay the rent will save you the headache of remembering to write these things on your calendar.

The interface of bright colors and big, clear buttons makes Ifttt so easy to use.

It’s likely that you’ve come across some of these features elsewhere already. You might even use them regularly. With Ifttt, all of the possible combinations of triggers and tasks that you can set up will make your life more simple and organized. You can also pause or turn off a task at any time. Having all of this control in one easy-to-use interface makes the process a breeze.

What do you think? What’s your favorite Ifttt recipe? Is there something it can’t do yet that you would like it to? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Category: archive, back up, buffer, corina mackay, Evernote, google calendar, ifttt, ifttt recipes, manage social media, profile pictures, rss feed, Social Media Tool, Tools, triggered events, tumblr /

3 Tools to Store and Search Your Social Media Activity

December 15, 2011 / Corina Mackay / No comments

Do you struggle to find a useful link you shared on Twitter or Facebook?

When you spend a lot of time online, you’ll inevitably come across too many great things to keep track of.

Whether it’s handy infographics, informative articles or just a hilarious video, it can be a lot of work (and sometimes impossible) to find them again later.

If you’ve been in this situation before, looking for something you saw somewhere online, you’ll love these three tools. Each one offers a different take on collecting your personal information and content you share online into a searchable database.

egoArchive: Everything you see online

egoArchive focuses on everything you read or look at online. It works as an in-depth, searchable dump-bucket of every site you visit.

egoArchive is "your memory in the cloud," so you don't need to remember anything.

egoArchive collects your data in two different ways. Connecting your Twitter, Facebook and Delicious accounts allows your activity on these services to be archived. Browser extensions are also available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. With the browser extension installed, egoArchive can see and archive all of the pages you visit.

Before you decide this is a little too close to an invasion of privacy, there are some safety measures in place. By default, no pages with a secure connection (https://) will be archived, nor will any pages visited while you are using your browser’s incognito mode. There’s also a blacklist feature, which lets you add any URL that you don’t want to be archived.

So, once you’ve got your accounts connected and your browser extension is up and running, you can use egoArchive to search through your data.

Your egoArchive homepage lets you browse the last 24 hours, last week, favorites and shared items.

Searching can be as simple or complex as you like. As well as entering keywords into the search box, you can sort your results by relevance or date, and choose which services to search: web history, Delicious, Facebook and/or Twitter.

Each search result will show a thumbnail of the site, a link and description, and the date and time you viewed it. You also have the options of deleting a result or saving it to favorites, searching only that domain and sharing the link with friends.

Comprehensive search results make it easy to find what you're looking for.

egoArchive is the perfect tool to find blog posts you’ve read online, status updates from Twitter or Facebook, or news articles that you can only vaguely remember. With the comprehensive search options, it can make finding items much faster than a traditional search engine.

egoArchive is currently in private beta, but the founders have been kind enough to offer an invite code for Social Media Examiner’s first 50 readers. Just click this invite link to sign up!

Memolane: Everything you share online

Memolane takes a more personal approach to archiving by focusing on items and content you share online. Known as “the timeline of your life” or “the scrapbook that writes itself,” Memolane is all about organizing and curating the content and updates you are already sharing online.

Here’s a short video to introduce the service:

Memolane offers connections to many social media accounts, from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube and Instagram. For each account that you connect, you can choose a separate privacy setting—private, public or “friends only.” Your updates are then pulled into a “lane,” where they are organized by date.

Updates from all of your connected accounts are aggregated into your personal stream or "lane" and organized by date.

Within a lane, each “memo” (or update) can be viewed specifically, with options to share, change privacy settings and add or remove the memo from your lane. Links in your memos are preserved, so you can revisit links you have shared previously.

Each memo includes the date and time it was posted in the grey bar at the bottom.

In addition to pulling all of your updates into one searchable feed, Memolane offers a similar service for Storify, by allowing you to create separate lanes around specific themes or events. You can then search or browse these lanes, which are limited to updates you have chosen.

Specific lanes can be singular or collaborative efforts, using updates from your choice of networks and time periods.

Memolane is a useful tool to search through updates you have posted and shared. If you like looking back over your activity online, this is a great way to do so, by pulling in updates from many (or all) of your social profiles. Creating separate lanes is a handy feature if you want to curate updates relating to an event, project or short time period.

Memolane accounts are free and you can start building your lane by visiting the sign up page.

Greplin: Everything that’s yours

Unlike Memolane and egoArchive, Greplin isn’t limited to your public updates and activity. Greplin works like Memolane, in that you need to connect the accounts you want to archive before it indexes all of your content. Available connections include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Gmail.

Several options are available only with a premium account, such as Highrise, Basecamp and Evernote.

Once your services have been added, Greplin will create an index of all of your content, including private items like emails. You can then search separate services, file types or everything at once.

Icons in the bar to the left show which services are being indexed and whether they're up to date.

Searching for content is a quick process. A drop-down box offers each of your accounts to be searched, as well as result types, such as links, events, messages and people. For a quick search of everything, you can leave this set to “all.”

Search results are counted into separate categories such as people, files and streams.

Search results are separated into categories, making it easy to find what you are looking for. Each category shows the first three results with options to show more, each result linking to the original content. Greplin’s clean and simple layout makes it easy to interact with the search functions and find items quickly.

Stream search results offer links to the original content, as well as profile links for the authors.

Integration is a highlight of Greplin, which adds optional search functions to your standard Gmail search bar, and offers browser extensions to search on the go. For a comprehensive search of your public and personal content, as well as items shared on your social networks, Greplin is a winner.

Bonus: Trunk.ly and the future of Delicious

When I began this post, I had planned to highlight one of my favorite archiving apps, Trunk.ly, which Social Media Examiner briefly mentioned in a previous post. Trunk.ly archives all status updates you share online that include links. It’s a fantastic (and passive) way to collect the links you share on social networks and find them again later.

Unfortunately, Trunk.ly is no longer accepting new sign-ups, and will close in the next two months. The good news is that it has been acquired by AVOS, the new owners of Delicious.

So hopefully this means that Delicious will soon offer a similar service. If you already have a Delicious account, I recommend keeping an eye out for this, as it has come in handy many times for me in the past.

What are your thoughts on archiving your online activity? Is it a handy service, or an invasion of privacy? Do you use another tool to back up and search your content? Let us know by leaving your questions and comments in the box below.

Category: archive, archive service, archiving, content curation, corina mackay, data, Database, egoarchive, greplin, information database, memolane, Search, social media archive, social media search, Tools, trunkly /