Archiving Tweets Using WordPress
Since I began using Twitter actively, I’ve been looking for a reliable way to ensure my tweets will be forever accessible. In my experience, Twitter never offered an easy way to locate old tweets. From a profile page, a user can keep loading tweets by simply scrolling down the page. That scroll-to-load approach works, but it takes a lot of time, and there’s no guarantee that Twitter will allow this mechanism to load thousands of additional tweets. As far as I can tell, there’s no simple way to find a tweet from June 2010, for example – even if you try to search by text, it won’t necessarily be found. It seems to me that Twitter prioritizes recent tweets, and eventually removes the older ones from their index. While I find this is somewhat appropriate for Twitter, I would prefer having the same confidence I have in Gmail. Regardless of how many e-mails I write, I know that Gmail will always keep them around.
After trying a few potential solutions, it eventually hit me: what if I could have one WordPress post per tweet? I would have no problems locating old tweets, as the WordPress search feature works quite well. The resulting database would be easy to manipulate, and completely under my control. Not to mention the huge amount of plugins available at WordPress.org. A couple hours later, I had the WordPress solution implemented, and am still using it today.
To get it working, I used two key WordPress plugins:
1) Twitter Importer by Brad Touesnard
I used Twitter Importer to retrieve all tweets that had already been published. This is necessary because the automatic tweet importer only handles new tweets.
2) Twitter Tools by Crowd Favorite
This plugin, among other things, is capable of automatically importing new tweets. To get it working, I had to register an application with Twitter, which is a bit odd – it seems like something only a Twitter application developer would need to do. In any case, once I got that configured, Twitter Tools began to import new tweets automatically. The rest is really a matter of preference: for example, I decided to disable comments, pingbacks, and other features that I felt weren’t inline with my intentions. I also downloaded and installed a WordPress theme that looked suitable for microblogging: P2, by Automattic.
The only imperfection I noted is a bug that I’ve first seen in Google Buzz. Twitter recently improved the re-tweet action, allowing users to simply click a Retweet button, instead of manually replying with the “RT @username” prefix.
Consider this tweet by Liana Maeby:
Being better off alone is super til you need to open the jar to trap the spider who’s crawling around where you’ve fallen & you can’t get up
— Liana Maeby (@lianamaeby) March 15, 2011
It is exactly 140 characters, the maximum allowed for a tweet. When re-tweeted, here’s how it looks:
Looks great; no “RT @username” pollution, instead, a clean icon in the top left corner. It seems like Twitter is handling it internally, rather than simply adding the “RT” prefix to the tweet. Yet, when you view the same re-tweet from outside Twitter, different story:
(as seen from Google Buzz)
(as seen from my WordPress-powered Twitter archive)
In these cases, the “RT @username” prefix is visible – and it actually uses up part of the 140 characters. If the tweet was 140 characters to begin with, this means the last few characters could be sliced off to make room for the prefix. Not only that, but an ellipsis is added to convey that the original text has been truncated. Since this is happening in Google Buzz, I’m ready to write this off as Twitter bug. It’s unfortunate, though, because it means my Twitter archive is truly imperfect. Tweets could be missing content, which sometimes means a URL gets chopped in half.
Imperfections aside, I believe I found a decent way to archive my tweets, all the while without changing the way I already use Twitter. Plus, my Twitter Archive includes links back to my other websites – so it should also be useful in bringing in new visitors.
The Road to Active Tweeting
It took me a while to warm up to the idea of microblogging, as popularized by Twitter. At first glance, I felt it encouraged the accumulation of mundane status updates, shared publicly, and communicated between accounts in an indirect, awkward way. Given that I spend a lot of time writing, I was practically insulted when I saw that they limited status updates to 140 characters. I didn’t understand how something of quality could be produced, given such limitations. I also feared that SMS abbreviations and slang would become prevalent, further taking away from the quality of such short messages.
So, when I eventually decided to create a Twitter account, it was merely to announce my new blog posts to a large community, to hopefully attract more visitors. I decided to auto-post my blog entries to Twitter via a WordPress plugin, including a special tag that would allow me to track the number of visitors I would receive. The experiment proved successful; announcing my new posts did result in a decent increase in visitors. As a result, I allowed the auto-posting to continue, and other than that, never really paid much attention to Twitter.
A few months later, something happened that caused me to reevaluate how I used Twitter. On one particular day, my WordPress database became corrupt, and after some work on my side, I managed to get it reinstalled and working… with the exception of one feature. My comments, managed by a WordPress plugin named IntenseDebate, were not appearing along with my blog posts. Since I placed a huge amount of importance in comments, I held back from posting, and instead waited to hear back from IntenseDebate’s support team.
Time passed, and though I contacted their support address twice, I still hadn’t heard back. I then noticed that they were happily instructing people to contact their support address from their Twitter account. Hoping to get their attention, I logged into Twitter, and directed a status update (known as a tweet) their way:
The idea of communicating with a company through Twitter had never occurred to me before. I liked the idea, given that the Twitter exists in such a public setting – I felt it would increase my chances of being noticed and helped. Unfortunately, despite further waiting on my part, I never heard back from them.
Eventually, I became quite annoyed, and decided to stop using IntenseDebate for comments, allowing me to return to blogging. As my first order of business, I decided to write a blog post about them, detailing my inability to get help from their support team, despite much effort. I titled the post “An Endless Wait for IntenseDebate“, and rather than having it be completely serious, I felt I should throw a comedic spin on the whole situation. I ended it with a poll, where I asked my readers when they thought IntenseDebate would get back to me, given everything I had experienced up until that point. The options in the poll were more towards the long-term, with the last option actually being a comical “They will never get back to you”.
About an hour after posting the article, I received an e-mail notification – one of the top guys at IntenseDebate had commented on my blog post, apologizing for the problems, offering his help. He even voted in the poll, saying I would hear back from IntenseDebate in less than a week. At first, I wasn’t sure how he found my post so quickly, but then it hit me: it was auto-posted to Twitter when I published it to my blog:
They were likely keeping an eye on all IntenseDebate related tweets, and spotted my latest, which was making them look bad. When I realized this, I immediately began to respect Twitter more; the public nature of tweeting benefited not only the companies, but also consumers. The situation sparked my curiosity about Twitter, leading me to start actively following other users. Mainly, these were comedians and celebrities that I knew of, as well as a few friends. I observed what kind of content they posted to Twitter, and kept the variety in mind. I discovered the concept of retweeting, which is pretty much repeating what another user has tweeted, while giving them credit for it. Considering my aversion to posting trivial information about my daily life, I quickly learned to retweet only the most unique updates I came across, those I deemed worth sharing. I discovered that 140 characters could very well be significant, with the right approach taken to Twitter. For example, I found writers that saw the character limit as a challenge. They manage to write interesting little scenarios within the confines of only 140 characters, not an easy feat.
Beyond content quality, I found great potential uses for Twitter’s location awareness. For example, whenever I heard about metro outages, I would tweet about it on my iPhone. That way, other people could search for tweets happening near them, and could potentially benefit from my warning. Soon enough, the actual transport company started tweeting about outages themselves, allowing me to cease this activity. It can be taken further than this, though, if you consider disaster situations, where it can be used as a means of warning others of danger, not just inconveniences.
Thanks to the experiences above, I am now an active Twitter user, no longer simply exploiting the community’s size. Though sometimes users opt to use Twitter as an online journal, there are others that find creative alternatives. If you previously decided to avoid Twitter, I hope my words have motivated you to reconsider, as there is much value in the service they offer.