How To Save Your Conference Tweets With RSS
So if you’v been going to conferences in the last year or two and just happened to want to look back later on all the good tweets, you know that they only stay in Twitter for about 7 days.
Today we’ll go through how to create an RSS feed to save your twitter stream for the upcoming SXSW conference:
When folks start out with Twitter, they often start by using the web interface. As their needs grow, they begin to look for other tools to manage their “Twitter lives” and ahem, “Twibes”.
Say Hello To Tweetdeck
Eventually, people find Tweetdeck. This is a great desktop application which allows you to sort people you follow on Twitter into columns. You can also create custom searches here and follow the discussion. Conference hashtags are also another popular thing to put into Tweetdeck.
Missing Tweets
Looking for something you said last month on Twitter? You’re not going to find it searching on Twitter’s page at http://search.twitter.com. Twitter does not store Tweets in their search for more than 7 days. If you have the specific URL to the tweet then you can see it.
This has caused a demand for ways to backup or store tweets.
Searching for Tweets
You go over to http://search.twitter.com
You do a search. In this case, I am going to do “#SXSW” for the upcoming SXSW conference
and we can see I have a list of tweets
Capturing Tweets in RSS
One handy way to store Tweets is by using the RSS option.
When you do a search in Twitter like we just did, to the right you will see the little orange RSS icon
Capture the RSS Twitter Feed
When you click it, you will get a screen of RSS.
No worries.
Just copy the url at the top.
In this case, http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23SXSW
We’re going to put this into our RSS reader
What The Heck is RSS?
I’m going to share Common Craft’s video, “RSS in Plain English” here so we’re on the same page about RSS
Adding Your Twitter Search To RSS With Google Reader
Ok, now that we know what RSS is, a very popular RSS reader is made by Google called, “Google Reader”.
It’s free and you can use it here http://google.com/reader
If you already have a Gmail account, you are ready to go with Google Reader
Twitter Search Meet Google Reader
Once you’re signed into Google Reader, you will see in the upper left hand corner, “Add a subscription”
Add a subscription
Click it and you will be presented with a box to fill out.
Enter Your Twitter Search
Here I’ve added in the url I got when I clicked on the RSS icon from Twitter search
It’s Alive!
We can now see there are 10 new items in our RSS for that Twitter search!
Keep Your Tweets
When you click to view the RSS feed, you can see the details of the tweets.
You can now search for them
Make notes about them
Share them
and most importantly, keep them around!
So with that, enjoy and look for me at SXSW!
I speak on Friday, March 12th at 2pm, “How Sci-Fi Shapes The Internet” and then I’m free to attend sessions, discussions and dinners! yay!
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