I decided to put tweetdoc through its paces today. A service created by a Manchester developer that promises to answer a need – archiving tweets.
I wanted to keep a record of all the discussions around last week’s Future of Journalism Conference which I attended and blogged about.(Links to that coverage here).
The hashtag was #foj09 but those tweets will soon be lost forever along with some valuable points and contacts I might want to retrieve at a later date.
The interface is simple to use with a quick registration process. There’s limited personalisation – a choice of headers (mine is “Twitter”) – but input is simple to follow with a basic title, description, date range.
The document created has a maximum of 100 tweets and shows them with the most recent first on a pdf document. See the results for yourself here: http://www.tweetdoc.org/View/417/Future-of- Journalism-Conference
It’s worth noting that the process does take a long time – I left my computer dealing with it after 25 mins, checked back at the hour point and then left it running while I went out.
(As an aside, I remain baffled by the icon at the top right of the user interface which looks like a women wrapped in spa towels?? but…)
Keeping and publishing tweets from an event on such a document will be a useful reference tool for journalists but maybe it could also become part of how such an event is reported, providing additional, unfiltered information for readers to dig deeper.
Dim Sum Digital 
Here’s a few other tips and tricks on that front: http://m.lifehacker.com/site?sid=lifehacker&pid=JuicerHub&targetUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flifehacker.com%2F5337796%2Fbackup-and-search-your-friends-tweets-with-google-reader%3Fop%3Dpost%26refId%3D5337796
http://delicious.com/paulb/twitter+backup
LikeLike
Hi Sarah,
First of all, many thanks for taking the time to try out tweetdoc. It’s good to hear your feedback and I’d just like to briefly comment on some of the issues you raised.
As you pointed out, the default size of a document is set to 100 tweets, but you can in fact increase this by typing in a larger number. The actual limit is 500 for bandwidth / fair use reasons.
So, if you find 100 tweets limiting, please do increase it – and here’s to hoping 500 will be more helpful 🙂
You also noted that the process took rather a long time. The process of creating the document should actually be pretty snappy, no more than 5 minutes I would expect.
The problem is that the page shows the loading icon if the document is not ready at the time of loading the page – it isn’t actually checking if the document is ready at any time afterwards. If however you were to refresh the page every minute or so, the loading icon would change and you should see your document. I plan on fixing this, as it is completely non-intuitive.
I hope that clears up some of the pain points.
Thanks again for writing about your experience with tweetdoc.
Kind regards,
Martin Rue.
LikeLike
Thanks for the comments Martin – have tweeted 😉
LikeLike