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Archiving Twitter in OPML

Wednesday, February 04, 2009 by Dave Winer.

In mid-January I started a project to archive the Twitter posts of the people I follow. At first I experimented with rendering the archives in an XML-compatible form of HTML, but decided the point would largely be lost, so I decided to go with OPML.  Permalink to this paragraph

You can find the folder of archives here: Permalink to this paragraph

http://twitter.opml.org/calendar/  Permalink to this paragraph

At the top level of each sub-directory is calendar.opml and today.opml. The former links to every OPML file for that user, and the latter contains all the twits from today, or the last day that person posted something to Twitter. Permalink to this paragraph

There's also a folder called 2009, and under that two sub-folders: 01 and 02 for January and February. And under each of those is a file for each day. In March there will be a folder called 03, and so on. Permalink to this paragraph

I do not archive posts for people whose Twitter accounts are private.  Permalink to this paragraph

The archive follows the whims of my follows and unfollows. If I started following someone on January 29, their archive would start on that day. If I unfollowed and then followed, there will be a gap in their archive.  Permalink to this paragraph

The archive is updated once a minute. Permalink to this paragraph

The server is in Amazon's EC2 cloud. Permalink to this paragraph

No guarantees are made that this service will remain up, I'm doing it entirely as an experiment, to learn what the issues and perhaps what the opportunities are. Permalink to this paragraph




     

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A picture named dave.jpgDave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

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