Over the last few days a friend of mine has been experiencing a slew of problems with Twitter.  They were removed from people they were following, their followers were removed from the account and in total, more than 200 contacts were lost.  When two people don’t follow each other it makes direct messaging impossible and even more complicated when one account is set to private.

Since Twitter has proven to not exactly be the most stable of web apps out there, I figured it would be a good idea to backup at least the people I follow, in case something similar happens to me.  How though?  There is nothing built into Twitter to allow this to happen and I sure as hell wasn’t going to take screenshots of everything.

A quick search on Google led me to Tweetake, an uber simple that will backup part or all, and I do mean all, of your Twitter information into a handy, downloadable spreadsheet.  This is made possible due to the open API of Twitter.

To use it, simple enter your username and password, wait a few seconds, longer if you have a huge amount of followers, and an .xls page will be made available for you to download.  For the first one I did, I backed everything up, including all conversations and tweets I’ve had, so much data!  If you don’t have Excel running on your computer, simply import the file into Google Docs, no biggie there.  There is seriously more data in this spreadsheet that you’ll know what to do with, so now I’m waiting for someone to write some creative macro’s to widdle down the data to some nice charts!

Seeing how Twitters future is somewhat blind, and the app has had issues being stable, I’d suggest doing a backup every few weeks, it’s free, simple and painless.

Similar articles that might also interest you:

Comments