My Twitter timeline is an important source of information and latest updates and so is yours. I use the Favorite feature to archive important tweets under “My Favorites” to get access to them easily later. But if anything goes wrong with the Twitter account, apart from my own tweets, I may lose all the important tweets saved in favorite list. Twitter does offer backup option on the settings page to download old tweets, but you may forget to take backup manually. Do you need a program to auto store all your favorite tweets and other tweets in Google Drive document (Google Docs) or a local database?
Archiving favorite tweets in Google Drive or local machine allows you to get access to them even without Internet connection. Using Google Chrome browser, one can set up offline access of Google Drive and continue using the docs stored in Drive even in case of Internet outage.
[box type=”info”] Download All Tweets into a PDF or XML Format[/box]
Favorite Tweets in Google Drive Document
Google provides 15 GB of shared free storage in Google Drive to store documents and other files. Using IFTTT, one can store all past and future favorite tweets in a document stored in Google Drive. The recipe of IFTTT will auto append future tweets in the same document. It means, when you need to browse your favorite tweets, just open that single document. You can also share that document with other people using Drive share option.
Follow the below steps to start storing your favorite tweets in Google Drive,
Go to this IFTTT Receipe and click on Activate buttons for Twitter and Google Drive accounts. Authorize these two accounts. Now your future favorites start appearing in a document stored in Google Drive. By default, it will create a new document named “New favorite tweet” under folder “Twitter Favorites”.
You can share that document with others as well or make that public using the “Share” button available on top-right corner of the document.
IFTTT doesn’t archive your old favorites. If you want to fetch the old ones as well, try the Local Database option detailed below.
Archive in Local Database
Tweet Nest is a self hosted PHP/MySQL based application to archive tweets. You can install this application on a host server or local machine and run the same using WAMP, XAMP or similar applications. Assuming that you have installed WampServer on your Windows system, now follow the below steps.
- Download the .zip file. Unzip the folder and upload inside the WWW folder available in WAMP folder copied in C: drive.
- Open localhost/tweetnext on your browser. If WampServer is running, the browser will open the setup page of Tweet Next.
- You need to enter the details including database name, Twitter Customer Key/Secret, Admin password etc.
- Create a database using PhpMyAdmin and get Twitter Customer Key/Secret by creating a dummy application on http://dev.twitter.com
- Enter the details and click on the Save button
Now open the page localhost/tweetnext page on browser and you will see a page with your live tweets. You can also see your favorites on this page as well. The only limitation is that the favorites appearing inside this application are the ones tweeted by you only.
There is also a IFTTT recipe to archive the tweets in a Dropbox text file.