response to “How to Archive Your Favorite Tweets” by Lee Skallerup Bessette on ProfHacker / Chronicle of Higher Ed, 10 Sept 2013. 

great post, thanks Lee.

The extension of Martin Hawksey’s TAGS sounds very promising, as this tool retrieve a full tweet record with all metadata, and almost any manipulation is possible once you have that in a spreadsheet. I’ve used TAGS many times for event hashtag archiving, and am currently exploring the use of it to capture all the tweets I *receive*, i.e entire home timeline stream, for filtering and analytics experiments.

Another possibility is Diigo, which I has the ability in the Premium plan to import all favorites from start (see http://blog.diigo.com/2010/12/05/update-and-tip-for-%E2%80%9Csave-favorite-tweets%E2%80%9D/ ) I have all mine, over 12k, in Diigo, now updating via IFTTT and I think I originally got the back favorites by getting Diigo Premium for a free trial or 1 month. The main issue I’ve had is that Diigo captures the tweet text and any included URL, but not the URL or source handle of the original tweet (i.e. status), which I sometimes would like in order to understand or revisit/cite it. However, it’s getting increasingly possibly to search and find the tweet in such a case, with Twitter’s own search or Topsy.

In general I find skimming Twitter and favoriting items into a read-it-later environment (I use Pocket mostly) to be a great, fast type of serendipitous discovery/reading, especially for mobile, and especially if it can be converged with other bookmarks/favorites/pins. I just reworked and extended my system for doing this across many discovery/reading environments: I discuss this and a conceptual model for reading + sorting flow in “From reading drift to reading flow.”

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Tim McCormick
@tmccormick tjm.org Palo Alto