In addition to searching, you can now browse tweets by month.
Just visit the new "browse" tab while you're logged in.
Now you can browse too
Milestones
From today there's a new option in your twitterscribe account settings - reminders for tweet milestones!
If you're close to hitting a milestone, say 20,000 tweets, @tscribe will reply to you with a reminder.
It's turned on by default so if you're not interested, login and turn it off.
Twitterscribe is alive!
Hello friends. It's been a long time coming, but Twitterscribe 2.0 has arrived, and it's better than ever. Let's take a look at what's changed.
Sign in with Twitter!
No more need to give away your username and password — we're now using Twitter's recommended authentication method, which means you can feel safe about your login details, and we don't need to worry about having access to them either.
Graphs!
You can now see on your home page a graph of all your tweets, faves and retweets by month.
Searching!
This is a big one. No more do you need to download your tweets to find that thing you said about cats in April last year! Just search for "cats", select the time period, and there it is. You can search across faves and retweets as well, and even choose to only find tweets containing links. Pretty handy, right?
Retweets!
Yes, now you can save all of your official-retweets as well. Make sure you turn this on when you sign up, or in your account settings.
And how do I get it?
If you're an existing user, just sign in and all your old tweets should be in there, ready to search and export.
If you're not already a user, then just sign in anyway, and we'll start the process of saving everything you tweet, favourite and retweet. We've got it in the bag/jar.
What should come next?
Hey there users. It's time for you to give me some more feedback. What feature should I add to Twitterscribe next? It's always nice to know what people appreciate the most, so I'd love if you took the poll below so I can see inside your lovely minds.
Open for business
The day has come. Twitterscribe is opening itself wide and letting you all come in (though we're still in beta). Hooray! Let us feast on lambs and sloths and orangutans!
What I've been up to
It's been a learning experience. With a small team of beta users, I've been forging bravely into the depths of the unknown, solving new and difficult problems in clever and interesting ways, but above all emerging triumphant.
Well, not really. There wasn't a lot to do really, nor a lot required of the beta boys and girls, as I just wanted to get an idea of the scale of the data.
Once I had a few users I started to rebuild the site more sensibly and add in scope for more functionality in the user area. Version one of the site was extremely limited and only let you export all tweets to CSV, so I needed to rectify this — but I had to build in the capacity to do new stuff first.
So over the last few months I've redesigned the user area, added in some more sensible functionality here and there, and finally added the ability to generate PDFs of your tweets.
The main thing now is to see how the site scales. With 58 users, the database currently stands at 147,600 tweets, and is around 25 meg. Obviously it's possible we're going to get completely overwhelmed with even smallish numbers of users, so I'm really holding my breath on this one. I'm no DBA so success may very well cause more troubles than joy.
So what's new?
Here are some things I've fixed since the last blog post:
- Blog wait, what? Oh crap, I forgot to do this one. How embarrassing.
- Fixed dates so users not in GMT have sensible dates on their tweets.
- Favourites you can now backup your favourites nightly, and export them in CSV or PDF in addition to your tweets
- Rejigged interface for more prettiness and functionality
- Manual imports so that once you sign up, you can add your tweets from as far back as Twitter will let you
- Close my account so that if you break up with me, you don't need to tell me to my face — you can write it in a letter, babe (figuratively), and I won't have to know.
- PDFs! Yes indeed, PDFs straight to your downloads folder. Now in two exciting flavours, classic and modern. Okay so they're just different fonts
And after that
Everything that I've mentioned in the previous post but not completed is still up for grabs. I think I owe it to you guys to get oAuth happening so I don't need your password, but after that anything could happen. Hoewever, I'm currently very close to having books ready to go so I imagine it won't take long before that rears its lovely, custom printed, hard-covered head.
By the way, if you want an idea of what a book of your tweets might look like, check out this excellent post.
Stop it, I'm blushing
I really hope you like the service. Tell all your friends. Tell your mum. Think of how awesome your own book could be.
And please, go easy on me. Like Mr Twitpic, this is a one-man service and bugs, outages and facepalming will be inevitable.
An update
What follows is the contents of an email I sent to all beta users a few weeks ago:
Hello Twitterscribe beta user. I hope you don't mind that I'm emailing you. I realised that because of the very basic nature of the current site, I have no blog, no news section, and no way to let you know what's going on. If anything. So please forgive me if I'm intruding. Let me know if you don't want any occasional email updates and I will make sure you don't get any. There shouldn't be too many anyway, because by the time there's something to report again, it may well be the fact that there is A Blog and email updates are unnecessary.
First off, thankyou ever so much for signing up to this crazy ride. I couldn't have done it without you. Well, I could've, but it would have been kinda pointless. So thankyou for signing up, and sitting back letting your tweets roll in to my database. Our database.
Now I'd like to address one thing that you're probably all thinking:
Yes, there are so many things left to do and I don't have enough time and also I kind of made it hard for myself.
I've been developing the site in Python as a nice little project to pick up more of the language, as I'm usually a PHP guy. But that means it's harder to just knock out updates. Also not helpful is the fact that I sort of screwed up my local dev version (long story), and I will probably have to rebuild it. So I've been putting that off, which means you guys haven't had any new Twitterscribe goodness. Sorry.
But! When I do get the ball rolling again, there's plenty to add...
Things that will almost certainly go in
There are all sorts of things that should be in there. Some are easy, others less so. Here's a list, in probable chronological order:
- Fixed dates on export: At the moment all dates are GMT. I am storing your timezones, though, so it's just a matter of applying the difference to the times and bingo, your tweets will be on time.
- Favourites: As requested, I'll download and store your favourites so you can have them forever too.
- Blog: So I can write this sort of stuff on the site and not spam you guys.
- OAuth: Eventually I won't need your password, Twitter will just ask you if you want to grant me permission to take your tweets. This is A Good Idea so it's definitely going to happen as soon as is feasible.
- New interface: The interface is kind of crap for actually doing stuff. I plan to rectify this. Everything will be jigged so that things make more sense, and there's more room for future bits and pieces.
- Manual imports from the past: Currently when you sign up, I attempt to import your last 1000 tweets. This is fine if you have less than that amount, but if you have more you'd be understandably sad you couldn't get them into the system. I'm going to add functionality that lets you (one-off) import as far back as Twitter allows, so that everything gets in that can.
- Close my account: I don't have any way to delete an account at the moment except manually. Hopefully this isn't something people are hanging out for.
- PDFs! Because the whole aim of this game was to get you some really pretty output. Everyone else does graphs, charts, word clouds, whatever – but here we're all about the tweets. As soon as everything else is up to scratch I'll start writing some nice PDF templates so you can download, print, and love everything that you wrote.
- Then books! Once PDFs are mastered, it's a hop, skip and a jump to lulu.com to get some custom books printed from them (and they're actually pretty cheap). This is the cool bit. A paperback of your own tweets! With your name and maybe some Twitpics on the cover! The excitement is palpable.
Things that might go in but are a tiny indistinct speck on the horizon right now
Keep in mind that there's plenty of space in here for anything you, my friend, might come up with. If you have ideas please whisper them in my ear.
- Twitpic integration: So your pics get PDFed along with your tweets.
- Other integration: Blog posts? Last.fm? It would be kind of cool to have a book that combined all of your "life streams" into one diary-type thing. A diary for the modern age.
- Who favourited your tweets: Something similar to favotter.matope.com that shows who favourited a particular tweet beside it. This is kind of tricky to do (and I'm not quite sure how they do it besides grabbing the public timeline constantly) so it's a maybe.
Please let me know if you have ideas, concerns, or don't want to hear from me any more. Come on, tell me. I can take it.
Otherwise, hope you're enjoying Twitterscribe. Look out for new awesomeness when I get around to it.