Archiving All of Your Twitter Followers Tweets via OPML, Google Reader, and Friendfeed
The other day Dave Winer posted a new tool he created to make OPML (essentially, blog roll files, or friends lists) files of one's Twitter followers. Great tool. He described its usefulness as:
You could use this format to import your subscription list into another app, if one existed. As far as I know none does exist. However, this is an essential step in a bootstrap to create new ways of consuming Twitter data.
I took it one step further. I wanted an easy way to archive all of my Twitter-followers tweets, whether they are directed to me or not. I'm already an active user on Friendfeed, so integrating this whole bootstrap solution in to that service was only natural. Here's how I did it.
- Generate the OPML file, follow Winer's instructions to get it syndicating on Google Reader.
- In Google Reader, under Settings > Folders and Tags, click the small RSS syndication-looking icon next to "Private" for the Folder that contains your Twitter followers (probably named "Twitter-username subscriptions")
- Click "view public page"
- On the public page for the folder, you should see an "Atom feed" link on the far right, get the URL for that feed. (mine looks like "http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F02004925579012804412%2Flabel%2FTwitter-leahey%20subscriptions")
- Now on Friendfeed, you're going to want to create a group (http://www.friendfeed.com/groups), name it whatever you like, but I suggest you make it private.
- Once created, add the Custom RSS/Atom feed from above, and voila. All of your Twitter-followers tweets are archived and (!) very searchable.
It's relatively straight forward. Currently, the RSS feeds for Twitter are more than a little bit behind, so this is by no means a client replacement. However, for archiving and searching older tweets, its an excellent solution. Additionally, it offers a whole host of backup possibilities. You can have the entire thing emailed to you in real time (I definitely suggest a secondary Gmail account for this one). Let me know what else you find!
Update: See my (now public) group here: http://friendfeed.com/ff-leaheytwitter
Posted 6 months ago
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