Just about everything you've ever wanted to make better about Twitter : Digging up old tweets, silencing loudmouths, finding better stuff to read, and a bunch of other tweaks is easy like Sunday morning with this guide.
I have endeavoured in this ghostly little article, to raise the ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. I am here today, your digital Jacob Marley, to show you how you’ve been squandering your Twitter life. Bah humbug, you say? Well, we’ll see.
The Ghost of Twitter Past
“Who, and what are you?”
“I am the Ghost of Twitter Past.”
“Long Past?”
“No. Your past.”
I’m sure some consider Twitter’s gnat-like memory a feature rather than a bug but, like Ebenezer Scrooge, there’s a lot to be gained by examining the past. So let us travel back. Back to your earliest tweets that we can find. Three thousand and two hundred tweets ago.
Why 3200 tweets? It’s an artificial limit put in place by the Twitter API. If you want to go back further than that, you’ll have to speak to someone at the Library of Congress.
If you’re just looking for a Twitter search that lets you go back further than a week I suggest SnapBird. It allows you to do quick searches of a person’s timeline without even logging in to Twitter. If you do authenticate your account, you can search across all of your friends’ tweets at once.
Maybe search isn’t enough for you, though, and you want to start taking the archiving of your tweets into your own hands. One great way to do this is to create a robust personal database of all your activity on Twitter, using ThinkUp and PHP Fog. You’ll not only start archiving all of your tweets and favs from this point forward, but your 3.2k most recent tweets as well. It is a bit technical to set up, but there are instructions and a walkthrough vid, as well as an FAQ that should have you up and running inside half an hour.
But, hey, maybe you don’t want to bother archiving all your tweets in a separate database. I know I tend to suffer from Not Another Thing syndrome, and would prefer to leverage my existing applications. The Ghost of Twitter Past suggests you at least archive the tweets that are important to you in a program you already use: Email.
We’ll use a wonderful little application called If This Then That, a service that automates tasks online, to pipe all your important tweets to your email account where they’ll be auto archived. Unlike signing up for PHP Fog and ThinkUp, ifttt is just a behind-the-scenes middle man. Once you’re signed up it works with all your existing accounts (Twitter, email) rather than being a separate repository.
What tweets would you like to archive? Here are some ifttt recipes for archiving all your own tweets, anytime you’re mentioned on Twitter, and anything you favorite on Twitter. Once you have those running, set anything matching this Gmail filter to skip the inbox. There you go. You just rolled your own Twitter archive in less than 5 minutes.
Now with the past taken care of, how do we make our current use of Twitter better?
The Ghost of Twitter Present
“Spirit, tell me if @TinyTim will live.”
“I see a vacant tweet in a poor application, a username without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will be blocked.”
Having too much stuff on Twitter to read is a good problem to have, and an easy one to solve. iOS users have especially good options in Instapaper, Readability, and Read It Later, all of which have their reading list functionality built into popular Twitter clients as well as standalone reading apps. A more independent and operating system agnostic choice is Pinboard which allows you to connect your Twitter account directly to the service rather than having to use a specific, intermediary Twitter app. Once connected, any favorited tweet will automatically have its link added to your reading list.
But, for suffers of Not Another Thing syndrome, the Ghost of Twitter Present directs us back to ifttt. If you use any of the 27 applications that work with Twitter, then it’ll be easy to roll your own read it later task thinger. Otherwise we’ll lean on ye ole reliable email to function as our reading list manager. Here are recipes to have your Twitter favorites sent to your email and any tweet with a link by someone you follow sent to your email. Use this Gmail filter for favs & this Gmail filter for link tweets to wrangle them; having those tweets hit your inbox but be marked as read is probably the way to go. The downside of using ifttt as a read it later service is that, since it doesn’t unroll Twitter’s t.co links, searching can be more difficult and brittle. The upside is that it’s easier to give a hat tip to whoever linked you to the item since their tweet is right along side the link in the email.
