export

The one feature I wish Twitter would implement soon

September 3, 2009 By Dan Thornton

There is one feature I dearly wish Twitter would implement as soon as possible. Although I understand they need a business model, and my day job will hopefully be made slightly easier with their proposed marketing/business tools, there is one thing which is becoming ever more vital to me as a user.

Let me search and organise my Direct Messages easily, please. Tweetdeck does.

(I’m trying to check through some of the other popular clients, such as Seesmic Desktop)

For me, Twitter is easily my most used social network – I do use the messaging functionality in Facebook and Linkedin, for example, but Twitter is the stream of contacts and information that I follow and interact with constantly.

And as my network has grown, and Twitter has increase in popularity, an ever-increasing amount of business and personal messages are flowing in and out of my accounts.

It’s starting to replace email as my primary form of conversation with many people.

And yet I have over 200+ Direct Messages, and more coming in every day. And despite my best efforts to sort and file the information, there’s so much getting lost in a list that I can’t order, filter or search.

And although I’m a fan of Tweetdeck, there are times when I can’t install Adobe Air, or I need to use the web interface for other reasons.

Cheers.

A User.

How to back-up your Twitter account and contacts

August 20, 2008 By Dan Thornton

As fast as we’re twittering, new applications are appearing! Just last week I suggested to a friend we should work on a system for backing up Twitter information – this week there’s already a choice of two applications.

Tweetake will back up your Friends, Followers, Favourites, Your Tweets, or Everything from your Twitter account. It does warn that you’ll need to exit certain Twitter clients, like Tweetdeck. Within a minute or two, I had an Excel file with 19 days of my last Tweets, and a list of people with their name, id (number in which they joined Twitter), description, location, last status update, avatar location on Twitter’s servers, and whether their updates were protected. The only thing I couldn’t find was an indication of which ones were followers, and which ones were friends. So you really need to export your friends as a separate list.

It’s a nice quick system, but it relies on you regularly backing up your lists. One benefit is you can see how many people are on Twitter within your friends list – mine started with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone at 12 and 13, and went up to the highest number at 15,160,529, although there were about 20 people with strange id numbers.

Twittersafe, like Tweetake, requires you to sign in with your Twitter username and password. It takes a while to log in, and you’re presented with a red ‘Back Up’ button and a couple of sponsorship adverts. Click to Back Up and everything goes quiet for a while. There’s a blank bar, which I presume should be a status bar. And that seems to be about it.

There claims to be an option to download an Excel copy, and future features will possibly include one-click restoration of your followers, which might be handy. But unless someone else has more success, it’ll have to be Tweetake and manually re-adding people!

Importing from Blogger to WordPress with Godaddy hosting

May 26, 2008 By Dan Thornton

There’s going to be some interruption to posting as I manually import about 6 months of blog posts that appear to have gone missing during my transfer from Blogger to WordPress.

The original import failed completely, until I spotted other users had problems importing – specifically when they are hosted by Godaddy. The easy way around this is to export, and then import to a hosted WordPress.com blog, and then import it from there to your hosted blog.

Worked fine for me until the import failed due to a rogue character somewhere that I just can’t find.

So now it’s Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for a while, whilst also trying to post some new stuff every so often, and rebuild by Page Rank and link equity…Who would ever transfer blogs!