You’ve Written All Those Tweets – Now Be Careful What You Do With Them
You’ve Written All Those Tweets – Now Be Careful What You Do With Them
I have read a blog post which estimates that the average length of an English word is 6 characters. As each Twitter post is limited to 140 characters and I have tweeted 2000 times I may have written as many as 46,666 words in the 2+ years I have been using Twitter. This comes down to an average of 23 words per tweet which might just about be accurate. The short and long of it is that I have written somewhere in the region of 45,000 words. Those words now live in the mythical computerise “cloud” and, according to Twitter’s terms of service although they remain my intellectual property, permanently licensed to Twitter to use as they see fit, they could be deleted at any point in time with no reason having to be given and with no recourse from my end.
On a more practical note, the majority of those tweets included links to articles, photos and the like which I thought were interesting. For this reason alone surely I should make sure that they don’t just disappear one day, giving me no access to them. Twitter regularly has issues with its search functions meaning even if you do an advanced search for a keyword on your own user name there is no guarantee that you will be able to find the link you posted.
There are ways around the Twitter back up issue. The best one I have found recently is Backupify a new, service providing users with up to 2GB of storage for free. The strength of Backupify is not only that you can get free backups of the web based services which you use around the web, but that it will give you either a daily or weekly scheduled backup of those services. Without me having to do anything at all, my tweets, WordPress blogs, facebook profile and more are all backed up automatically, everyday! Critics would say that the system is not flawless, in backing up to Backupify you are simply moving data from one part of the “cloud” to another however Backupify uses Amazon’s S3 service which is certainly the current industry standard for online data storage and doesn’t seem to show and signs of going away any time soon. To get round the issue that both your original data and backup are on remote servers you can download your backups to your own machine and then back them up locally as you would any other important data.
The strength of the Backupify offering really only became clear to me the other day when I downloaded the PDF they provide you of all the tweets on your account. This PDF – which included different sections for your own tweets, replies and direct messages – was what I used to generate the word cloud at the top of the post, and ran to some 270 pages. By copying the PDF into my notes programme, Evernote, I have completely done away with the need to run Twitter search to find my own tweets, I can do it all locally on my own computer by searching the latest PDF of my tweets in Evernote. They’re even available through my Mac’s spotlight search.
Photo credit: The Fail Whale from Twitter.com
Popularity: 26% [?]