twitter: from /dev/null to /dev/log
I’m an old twitter user, my very first tweets date back to 2006, but after a while I developed a love-hate relationship with it.
I used to call it “the /dev/null of the web”, because things that got into twitter were lost -at least, in every sense that mattered to me.
Yestarday, I finally got the option to download my twitter archive. And suddenly, twitter became much more useful and interesting. It used to be /dev/null, it is now /dev/log.
I downloaded the archive and I uploaded it to my domain, http://www.vrypan.net/twitter-archive/, and it’s fun to browse through it. And the twitter engeneers did a great job at giving us more than just a bunch of html pages, kudos to them.
There’s space for improvements.
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I’ll probably write a couple of (python) scripts that do some post-processing on it, like fully expanding short URLs (t.co URLs are expanded, but if you use any other URL shortener, they are not) and localy downloading images linked from tweets (maybe videos too) and displaying to them instead of third party sites. (But if someone goes ahead and writes something like this first, or even better if someone has already done it, please let me know!!!)
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I’m sure it should be easy to theme the local archive. Any links to examples?
In any case, I’ll feel much more comfortable using twitter from now on.