The Library of Congress has my cheese sandwich

December 30, 2011 11:53 AM

I'd like all my past, present and future Twitter activity to get saved to a text (csv or xml or whatever) file on Dropbox. I'd like to think about this as little as possible. What's my best bet?

I don't really trust Twitter to keep all my activity online for the rest of eternity. Dropbox is great because it sits on the actual filesystems of multiple computers I keep in multiple locations. I've done one-off dumps of twitter activity in the past, but never keep it up.

I have Linux or OSX systems to run this on. I am very comfortable with the basics of unix cron, output redirection, etc.

I would just like something that runs in the background, recovers from downtime gracefully, and spits out plain text. If I have to use something different to build an archive to present day, I can live with that.

posted by These Premises Are Alarmed to Technology (6 answers total)

I'm sure someone will be along with something you can run on your own systems, but until then you might want to look at ifttt.com. I have it saving my Twitter activity into an Evernote document, but it does integrate with Dropbox, so I would imagine you could have it easily set up to save to a document in your Dropbox instead.
posted by Stacey at 12:14 PM on December 30, 2011

Iffft.com can do exactly this for you (although it might save each tweet individually). I love that site.
posted by ukdanae at 12:18 PM on December 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

You can also try backupify.com. I don't think it integrates with Dropbox but it will backup your Twitter account.
posted by mingshan at 12:30 PM on December 30, 2011

Jotunheim for iOS saves all your social media postings and lets you export them as plain text. I'm pretty sure it was made by a mefite, but I don't remember who.
posted by desjardins at 12:57 PM on December 30, 2011

ThinkUp is designed to do this. And a lot more, so it may not meet your simplicity criteria. I also just stumbled into TwitterBackup, a Java program, no idea if it works.

Be aware that no matter what you do, Twitter will only let you access your past 3200 tweets.
posted by Nelson at 1:15 PM on December 30, 2011

One more option is Google Spreadsheets - there's a 'script' available from the script library that scrapes twitter for all sorts of uselful info; it should be simple to export that as a csv.
posted by dirm at 8:34 PM on December 30, 2011