You’ve organised or participated in a great event about how technology is changing the shape of X, Y or Z. The audience were tweeting away, and an expectant crowd outside the room were following the #coolevent hashtag avidly.
You take the weekend off to recover and decide to come back to Twitter search on Monday morning to review the backchannel and post-event feedback, only to find that Twitter has wiped them from its public search, which can now last only a day or two. Gah!
A while ago, Dave Briggs put a call out for help to store the tweets around an event he was covering. I knocked together a very simple front-end to the Twitter Search API, which built a simple HTML table for any specified hashtag, which you could cut and paste into a spreadsheet and save for posterity, or make clever charts or Wordles from.
It got a surprising amount of traffic on Dave’s server, so we’ve revamped it a bit and given it a proper home: Searchhash.com.
Now it’s easier to download the ready-made CSV file, see what others have been searching for, and share your archived tweets with the world via a long-term permalink. All you need to do is remember to do a quick search at the end of the event and the tagged tweets will be saved for you.
Even better, if you find it useful, there’s a little tipjar and some lovely Google ads on the site so you can show your support and keep us in beer (and web domains).
Enjoy!
Comments
It’s crap that twitter sweeps old tweets from search, although their links still exist.
Twapperkeeper has been rock solid for me, they have some add-on analytics, and even have an open source version you can run on your own server.
http://www.twapperkeeper.com/