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« Translation Technology Can Open Your Eyes to a Global Social Web | Main | AOL Integrates Lifestreaming into AIM for the iPhone »
Friday
Sep112009

How To: Backup Your Tweets and Make Them Searchable with Google Calendar


As I understand it, Twitter doesn't make more than your last 3000 tweets archived or searchable. But you can go store them going forward using Twistory and Google Calendar.



I had signed up for Twistory way back in late 2007 and added it to Google Calendar. However, I had forgotten all about it since I had that calendar hidden from the default view. I was delighted today when while tinkering that all of my tweets since have been archived! Here's how you can do the same for yours, at least going forward.



First, visit the Twistory site and enter in your Twitter username. Then you will be redirected to a page where you can subscribe to your tweet calendar in any one of a few different formats. 


Second, I would subscribe to it in Google Calendar. This will add all kinds of Googleness to your tweets, like search and exporting.


Finally, once your more recent tweets begin to populate in GCal they will all be archived going forward. You can browse them by date, or as you can see below, search them.


Very handy indeed.






Reader Comments (45)

Very cool. Sounds more efficient the hack I came up with.Scrape all of your Tweets and post them in a Wordpress blog which makes them both searchable in Wordpress and Google's SERPs.

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterTim Cohn

Great tip. I've been using Twistory for a while and sort of forgot about it.

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterJoe Bonner

why not just subscribe to your own twitter feed in google reader? seems cleaner, no?

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered Commenterravi g.

@Ravi, you could but this is more - well, FUN!

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterSteve Rubel

Good idea ravi g.To get your own Tweets you have to feed a search with your own account otherwise you get every Tweet you follow. Pretty sure feeds don't get indexed Google.

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterTim Cohn

i don't know why, but i can't see them on my G-calendar.. :Z

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterAlberto

Think there's a delay on the Gcal side.

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterSteve Rubel

another great tip - thanks!

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterMike Young

Wow, Steve, thank you so much for this tip! ))Going to tune my Twitter account up with Twistory and G-Calendar.Thank you again.

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterBoris Khodorkovsky

Very cool. Trying it now, except Google Calendar is maddeningly slow to update from external feeds. Have the same problem with my Facebook Events calendar feed going into Google Calendar though, so it's not unexpected.

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterOtto

Thanks for linking! We're launching Twistory 2 in a few weeks, adding some cool new features (and faster as well).

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterTijs Vrolix

Very Cool. Thanks for the tip!

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterYoel Sommer

why stop at your twitter feed? I push my lifestream rss feed into a dedicated twitter account which I then push through into gcal using this twistory. So now I can go back to any date and see what I was up to - music, films, blog posts, places, etc. The only problem is that the interaction between twistory and gcal is a bit ropey.

September 11, 2009 | Unregistered Commenterjuniorbonner

No joy yet on getting Twistory to populate to Google Calendar. Internets must be clogged.

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterPaul Swansen

Does this actually back them up? I thought subscribing to a calendar just gave you a view into the subscribed calendar. So if they dropped off of twitter they would drop off your calendar?

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterScott Kingery

Very cool tip. I haven't tried Twistory yet, and it looks like I'll get to come in just as they are releasing Twistory 2! Thanks again! Cheers.

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterRoland Frasier

cool tip! works fine for me

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterBarbara R. S.

Is it possible to select only a range of days in the calendar just as in google analytics and be shown all tweets/emails sent/received on those dates alone? Lets say you are on vacation for 10 days. After returning from vacation you want to view only those tweets/emails for this period.

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterMohan Arun L

Great advice, Steve! Thanks for sharing.

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterTom Carswell

I'm just using twitter, this is a good tip, thanks steve!

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered Commentermax

Thanks Steve, and thanks to the commenters for their ideas as well.

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterBrent W. Hopkins

It just goes to show you, there's still a lot of room for innovation in the calendar app space.

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterBrent W. Hopkins

Love it! Thanks for a great post! Having a tweet history that is searchable can come in quite handy.

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterDiane Stein

Thank you! This was very useful, will use from now on. Have a great weekend, Steve!

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterHarold Cabezas

Extremely geeky, but yet entirely useful. Looking forward to testing this out.

September 12, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterSean O

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