How to use Storify

Adapted and updated from "Some ways to use Storify - curate an archive, add context, tell a story" published on FreePint on Thursday 1 September 2011. Also, as this is my first post of 2016 - happy New Year! :)

This is a detailed 'long read' post, if you're after a briefer overview please see How to use Storify like a pro to collect tweets over on my dedicated 'how to do techy things' blog.

Storify is a tool that lets you thread together individual tweets (and also capture them for posterity, even if deleted) to form a story or record of a discussion. You can also capture any individual 'bit' of social media including an Instragram photograph, a blog post, a YouTube video etc. Once published you can share your Storify as a link on Twitter or even embed it into a blog post (except free Wordpress.com which doesn't let you do that) or you can keep the story as a private draft copy. The free Storify tool has changed a lot since I first wrote the above article and I thought I'd update it with some new screenshots.

Visit Storify at http://storify.com. The first thing to do is to log in or create an account - if you've never used the service before you might need to use the green 'Sign Up Free' to start (I honestly can't remember) but you could also try the pale blue 'Log In' button on the top right to log in with Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Table of Contents

1. Logging in
2. Starting a new story
3. Twitter and other social media services
4. Twitter in depth: adding tweets to your Storify
5. Using the Embed link / Embed URL icon
6. Setting the main image icon
7. Things to be aware of - a round-up

1. Logging in
Images: click on any image to enlarge it, then look for an X on the page to close it and return to this post or use the back button on your browser.

Figure 1. This is the start screen at http://storify.com

Figure 2. This is the option you see once clicking on the green button on the start page. 

Figure 3. ...and this is the option if you click the pale blue 'Log in' option on the front page.

2. Starting a new story
As I'm logged in already to Twitter I clicked on the 'Log In' option on the first page and then 'Login with Twitter' on the second - this lets me authorise Storify to use my Twitter credentials.

Then I'll see a page like this

Figure 4. All my Storify stories.

The options available to me (as a non-paying user) are 'All', 'Drafts', 'Published' and 'Edited'. You can also publish a private Storify to share with selected people, but not without paying.

On the top right of the image above 'New Story' will create a fresh editing window with a whole load of icons on the right hand side.

Figure 5. The two-panel editing window.

The editing window is split in two. On the left is where you create your story. On the right is where you search for and select what you'll put in it.

3. Twitter and other social media services
The icons on the right let you filter your search for social media items by different services.

Figure 6a. Storify: all the options

The options are

• Storify (selected in the picture above)
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Embed URL - this one is really useful
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Gifs
• Flickr
• Getty Images
• Google search
• Soundcloud
• Tumblr
• RSS feed
• Google+
• Disqus
• StockTwits
  (note: if your screen isn't set at full width then some of these might appear hidden behind three dots •••).

To use either the Instagram or Facebook search you are expected to connect your account (even to search public stuff) but instead you can use the Embed URL option, if you know or can find the link for the individual Facebook post or Insta picture (and as long as the item is public, not private).

Each icon has its own sub-options, which are grey icons or text below the larger grey icons, and some examples are shown below

Figure 6b. Storify: the options for Storify search - Search, Saved Elements, Stories, Elements

Figure 7. Twitter: the options for finding tweets - Search, then the others are denoted by icons. Person icon is 'user' so type in username to see their tweets, 'star' to see their favorites. The clock icon shows you your own timeline. 

Figure 8. Flickr: The options for searching Flickr include selecting photos with a CC licence and viewing the public photos from any user.

4. Twitter in depth: adding tweets to your Storify
I think most people probably use just this option alone and collect a bunch of tweets from a user, a conversation or a hashtag. To do this click on the Twitter icon and then search for a hashtag or a user (you can search their name to see tweets sent to or from them, or use from:username just for those they sent [or use the 'User' option].

Pro tips:
(1) When you search, eg for the hashtag #twitterhelp, Storify will show you 50 results which you can transfer into the editing pane on the left. Don't do this yet. Scroll to the bottom and choose the 'Show more results' (and keep doing this until Storify stops producing more tweets). It's best to get the maximum number in this right hand pane before transferring them. If you transfer your first 50 you have to re-run the search to find more (and you end up duplicating).

(2) You can eliminate unwanted tweets (eg spam tweets, spam links, irritating users etc) by subtracting them from your search - eg #twitterhelp -jobrodie would bring up tagged tweets that everyone had sent except me.

(3) If you're just after a few tweets select the ones you want from the results on the right but if you want large numbers it's probably easier to move all the results into the left pane and then delete the ones you don't want.

(4) Caution: be aware that publishing your Storify may alert one or more of the people whose tweets you've included, even if you don't share a link to your story. People can sign up to Storify and may receive an email alert if one of their tweets is used. If you prefer not to make this obvious then keep it as a draft (or pay to publish it privately). In order to save or publish your Storify you'll need to give it a title.

If your Storify will contain only tweets then you're pretty much done unless you want to refine things a bit by re-ordering the tweets (so the earliest appears first rather than reading backwards in time) or adding in a bit of context.

Adding context with a text box 
Note that this is best done after re-ordering.
Click between any two tweets to bring up a text box that lets you write and format text. In the picture below there are formatting options that appear when you select some text.

Figure 9. Adding commentary: inserting a text box

• H = toggle between making the text a heading or regular paragraph text. 
• Clock icon - prints the current date and time. 
• Link icon - hyperlink the text with a web address 
• Anchor icon - link to a section within the Storify (you'll need to have created one or more H header sections)
• B / I / U / S = bold, italic, underline, strikethrough.

If you hover over any text box an X will appear on the right hand side which lets you delete it.

Re-ordering the items
You can click and drag any item up or down and drop it somewhere else in the list - the collapsed view is particularly good for helping with this. You can also automate this by clicking on the Reorder button (shown below, next to the Collapsed view option) and pick which you prefer. I'm a fan of reading the things in the order they were posted so tend to prefer the 'Reorder by oldest first'.

If your Storify contains a conversation happening among more than two people it's possible that tweets sent later will be in response to an earlier tweet - you can manually move these up or down to maintain the threads.

Caution: if you have added a text box during editing Storify will treat is as a recent item and reordering will move it away from the tweets or section that you originally placed it in. I recommend doing any reordering first, then adding in supplementary text.

5. Using the Embed link / Embed URL icon
This is a really useful option and I think it of it as a sort of override button when all else fails. You will find when searching Storify for tweets that many won't appear. This is because the search on Storify doesn't go as far back in time as Twitter.

This doesn't matter because you can find the tweet on Twitter.com (desktop is best for searching), then copy its URL over to the Storify. Every tweet has a timestamp and its URL can be found by hovering over that and copying the link (right click / copy link location).

Similarly every Facebook post has its own timestamp from which you can collect the link (you'll only be able to use it though if the post is set to be public) and every Instagram picture has its own link too. These links can be pasted into the embed URL search bar and the 'item' should appear for you to drag into the appropriate place on the story.


6. Setting the main image icon
By default Storify will use whatever image appears at the top of your story, so if someone's tweet has a picture in it and that's at the top of your story that's the one that'll get used.

You can pick a different picture, but you will have to publish the post first to do this.

a) Publish your post
It's the blue button with 'Publish' on it!

b) View your published Storify story
Click on the green 'Published' button that replaces the orange 'Draft' button. That tiny down-arrow will unfurl a menu from which you can select 'View Published Story'.

c) Choose a different image
Hover over any image, or item that contains an embedded image and some options will appear to the right. If you see the third grey icon in the options to the right of the picture (third one below, looks cunningly like a picture) then you can click that to select that particular image as the one that will appear at the top. Were someone, perhaps you, to add the link to your Storify story on Facebook etc then that's the image that will now be associated with it.

  

d) Log out

Once you've finished creating, editing, saving or publishing your story you can log out using the tiny little down arrow to the right of your username.

7. Things to be aware of - a round-up
a) The content (a tweet, the abstract of a blog post) added to Storify will remain there even after it is deleted from the main service.
b) If you add a lot of tweets and decide to reorder them do that bit before adding in any other commentary, otherwise you'll reorder your commentary out of the order you wanted it in
c) Publishing a story is a public act even if you don't tweet out the Storify's link or share it anywhere. Anyone who has previously used Storify themselves may be notified, by email, that one of their tweets etc has been used in your Storify so they may hear about it. If in doubt, keep it as an unpublished draft.

How to make it look like you've embedded a short Storify into a free Wordpress dot com blog post

I'm a little smugger than usual today because I worked out how to do a slightly clever thing. It's not difficult, though a little fiddly and requires patience but it worked well. I managed to create a blog post on Wordpress.com that looks as if I've managed to embed a Storify story in it.

Jump to '5. How I did it' to find out how I did it...

Also see useful comment from @krelnik below. As always I write these things only for someone to tell me of an easier way later :-)

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1. Exciting background preamble
I recently had an interesting chat with a colleague on Twitter and realised in the middle of it that I should capture this and add it to the 'work Storify' for @chi_med (it lives at 'Using everyday errors to understand more serious ones').

2. You can't embed Storify stories in free Wordpress dot com
The work blog (http://chimedblog.wordpress.com) is hosted at the free version of Wordpress and the one thing you can't do is embed a Storify story there. This is because of the type of scripting that Storify uses (I think, it's a bit beyond my technical payscale) but it's well-known that it can't yet be done.

You can embed a Storify in blogger and it works really well, recreating itself each time the blog post is loaded. Here's an example.

I have made a bit of a study of things you can and can't embed in the free version of Wordpress at "Will it embed? How to embed all sorts of things on free Wordpress dot com blog posts"

3. You can embed individual tweets into free Wordpress dot com but...
However you can very very easily embed individual tweets, simply by pasting the tweet's URL into the Visual editing window (not the Text editing window). The tweets embed beautifully and the end-result is very pleasing (example - some tweets from the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security).

3b. ...if they're part of a conversation you can't get rid of the preceding tweet
I tried recreating the Storify as a blog post by pasting in the text I'd written, then pasting in each tweet's link. When I came to preview it though a problem became clear - each tweet that my colleague had sent was a 'reply to' the one I'd sent. And each one showed up with my original one, every single time - it looked a repetitive mess.

4. I've no idea how to embed blog posts within a blog post (!)
One of the nice things about Storify is that you can add in more than just tweets. If you stick in a link to a blog post, or even another Storify story then the system will create a sort of thumbnail image, that's clickable and will take you to the original. Because I'd referenced a blog post and a Storify story I wanted to recreate that in my blog post but there's no obvious way to 'embed' within a post in this way...

5. How I did it
Here's the original Storify
Here's my 'faked' let's make it look like I've embedded that Storify in a blog post.

This is straightforward but would probably try your patience if you had more than 20 elements in your Storify story.

I took screenshots of the tweets, blog post and the embedded Storify story (from someone else) that I'd originally added to my own Storify story. Then I cropped them using the free MS Paint (variously called paintbrush.exe or paint.exe) that's bundled with Windows so that they were exactly the same size as they are on Storify.

Following the layout of my Storify I added in the images at the relevant points (there were 12 in total) and, for hyperlinked the tweet images to the original tweet and the blog post (and other Storify story) were hyperlinked to the relevant media.

On uploading an image to Wordpress you're given an option to change its URL. The default is the location on the Wordpress servers of your file but you can point it anywhere you like, so I did. The dialogue window looks like this (click to enlarge image). On the right hand side you can see, in the Attachment Display Settings' an option for Custom URL that lets you add in the address of your choice.

'Wrongfooted' is just a shorthand for one of the stories I embedded, about wrong-site surgery in the wrong foot - fortunately the patient was scheduled to have both feet operated on so the situation wasn't disastrous, but could have been!

6. How can you tell my version is faked?
None of the 'web intents' on the tweets work. These are the little things that, if you're logged in, let you favourite or retweet the tweet from the blog post. On mine you can only click on it to visit it in its original setting.

7. What happens if you've got hundreds of tweets in your Storify
If you have the patience to collect the URL of each tweet and embed, fine. If it's a hashtagged conversation then each tweet might not be in reply to another one so each tweet will probably show up as a single 'unit'. You can right-click on the tweet to copy its URL and stick that in the Wordpress editing window, copying and pasting any additional text that you've written in the Storify.

You do not need to have published your Storify to do this - you can create a draft copy specifically in order to generate thumbnails of blog posts, other Storify stories, websites etc - it's a pretty useful thing actually.

If you have a great long run of tweets with no text in between them then you might as well take a screenshot of five or six tweets at once, but remember you won't be able to hyperlink them individually.

Minipost for Jude @theunitlist "what Storify type tool can handle tweets older than 1 week please?"

anyone have suggestions for storify type tool that can handle tweets older than 1 week please?
— The Unit List (@theunitlist) August 29, 2012

This post is about freely available tools - there may well be paid-for tools that will do this job even better, please feel free to share in comments. Epilogger is a free tool which I've not yet had cause to use but it might be worth investigating for this - I think it can do more than other tools.

There are two things to think about here. The first is finding old tweets, the second is capturing them. These are separate but related.

Finding
Storify (and Chirpstory which is a similar tool) can often find tweets that are more than a week old although this will also depend on the number of related tweets. If a popular event has had thousands of hashtagged tweets then these tools will only be able to find tweets from one or two days back.

Topsy.com is a great free tool that can find tweets going back much further in time, however it doesn't let you find them in a nicely ordered way - it's a bit random.

If you know who was participating in a conversation you can scroll through their individual timelines to collect tweets (remember each tweet has its own web page / address / URL that can be added to a Storify story). You can also collect tweets from people's favourites, you might find them embedded in other Storify stories or on people's blogs.

Capturing
Normally, when an event is happening the 'finding and capturing'is more or less the same - you can type in your hashtag and a whole bunch of tweets appear in the results window which you can then add to your story.

You can use all sorts of tools to do different versions of this: Twilert will send you emailed alerts of the results of a Twitter search, GrabChat and SearchHash will pretty much automate the finding and capturing of a bunch of tweets (they do need a little bit of babysitting, in terms of collecting the older tweets before they disappear) and there are a whole load of other free / paid-for tools available.

It helps to be aware that Twitter has changed quite dramatically since 2011 to the point that it seems to be (deliberately) that much harder to find older tweets (we used to have Google Realtime which made things very straightforward for scrolling back 18 months or so).

If you can find the URL of a tweet - on Twitter.com look for the 'details' link which appears when you click on a tweet to expand it, on other services look for the twitter bird icon - the URL's probably hidden within it (basically hover over anything until something twitter URLish appears eg https://twitter.com/theunitlist/status/240755916344020992) then you can add it manually to Storify using the link option. That's the little grey button with a small linked chain on it, to the right of the other buttons in the picture here.

Basically after one week you can find tweets with one tool and capture them with another, but the closer you are to when the tweets were posted the easier it is to use one tool for everything.

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Further reading - all cited in the post above though.

Monday, 30 May 2011
A list of tools for finding or capturing tweets - this is a long, detailed post looking at a range of tools (some no longer available but I have been a bit 'completist' about the whole thing) for finding, trapping, displaying (eg on a screen behind a speaker, or in a foyer at an event).

Wednesday, 30 May 2012
Storify has added an 'add all tweets' button - hooray - a very short post with a picture to show where to find this useful (to me) newly added improvement.


Thursday, 19 July 2012
Using free tools to capture a handful of tweets or a larger bunch - medium-length post highlighting some of my favourite tools and how I use them. I've not added Epilogger yet but it should really go here I think.

Storify has added an 'add all tweets' button - hooray

One of the reasons I've traditionally preferred Chirpstory over Storify is that Chirp has always let you move large amounts of tweets at once (50 at one go). I've just noticed that Storify now lets you move 20 at one go - I don't know how long this has been possible, only visited the site today.

Anyway this is the bit to look for, highlighted in green.



For big events with lots of tweeting I'd still go for Chirpstory - another advantage is that you can re-order the tweets so that the earliest is at the top. You can also easily remove duplicates (which can creep in if you go back and edit on the second day of the conference, for examp, adding in the more recently posted tweets).

More Twitter wrangling tools here: http://brodiesnotes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/list-of-tools-for-finding-or-capturing.html

Some quick thoughts on Storify as a mini archive for Tweets

The shortened link for this post is http://is.gd/qYFuwp

EDIT: 30 May 2011 - Have discovered a useful thing that is a huge help in moving tweets (or other items from left to right): double-click on an item in the left and it will snap to the top of the right hand side panel, or use SHIFT double-click to make it snap to the bottom :)

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Storify (http://storify.com/) is a lovely bit of web-based kit that sort of lets you trap tweets and it appeared on my radar during my mourning period for What the Hashtag and Twapperkeeper. Those two tools would do the work for you, sniffing the tweestream and picking out the hashtagged tweets you'd asked it to save, then presenting them to you (all nicely in order) for export to a text file. Lovely. But these are more or less no longer with us.

Twapperkeeper doesn't let you export an archive of hashtags and will only let you save two archives. What the Hashtag has been taken over by What the Trend and is no longer doing that sort of thing. In fact, according to Twitter's terms of service it seems that it's not possible to do this:

Additionally, and maybe most importantly, Twitter's recent changes to its Terms of Service (TOS) now prevent us from providing transcripts of conversations around a hashtag.

Source: http://wthashtag.com/whatthetrend.com

Storify however, absolutely definitely lets you create an archive of hashtagged tweets, it even lets you embed it in your blog. It's awesome, but the major disadvantage is that you have to manually add each tweet that you want, and you're restricted to a number of tweets (I've not worked out how many yet). It would seem to be at odds with Twitter's TOS (as I understand it from what WTHasthag says above) but perhaps Twitter doesn't seriously envisage anyone using this as an archiving tool because of the amount of effort involved.

I've begun testing Storify to see what I can do with it and will continue to report here :)

1. What happens when a Storified tweet is deleted on Twitter?

Seemingly not much. The tweet I deleted on Monday is still forming a part of the Storify story I created on the Sunday.

2. How many tweets can you access?

Don't know - I have just played around with the #streettalks tweets and it let me go back (you have to keep pressing 'load more' until it stops giving you that option) a day or so - however this was a small meeting in a pub and not a large science conference where tweets tend to ticker tape out at quite a rate.

There is a limit on both the number of tweets you can access and how many days back you can go, and I think these are independent. For example if you were searching for the hashtag #madeuptag but no-one had written a tweet mentioning it for, say, a year or several months, it may well not show up in your tweets, so there is a time thing to be aware of.

While investigating Storify for use by @marilyneb just now we found that her hashtag of interest, #pas2011 could find four days' worth of tweets because it hadn't been used very much. So for capturing low volume hashtaggeed tweets Storify seems to work beautifully.

3. If you can go back to, say, 500 tweets, does stripping out the RTs (eg let's assume 200 of the tweets are RTs) allow you to access an earlier batch of tweets?

Don't know.

4. Transferring tweets from the left hand side panel to the right hand side panel is not that easy on a small laptop with a pointing device rather than a mouse. It's just a bit fiddly. For serious use I think a desktop is a lot easier. I was only half joking when I tweeted the other day that one day we might see people paid to sit in conferences and do precisely this (sweeping tweets as they come in, into a Storify to save them), unless Twitter sorts out its TOS so that third party apps can archive stuff again.

Because it's a bit harder (for me) to move them, what I've done is bung them into a draft Storify - here's what I said:

These are a series of tweets that are not in the order in which they were posted. I just grabbed them from the feed and bunged them here. It will be easier to reorder them if I let them sit for a few hours or at least more than a day.

This is because a newly posted tweet will say it was posted 'x minutes ago' then 'x hours ago' then 'about x hours ago' and finally 23.06 May 4th - and that's when I'll swoop in and reorder them.

Or, what I can do is create a fresh Storify and select from THIS Storify the elements I want to use.

Source: http://storify.com/jobrodie/draft-of

5. If you're archiving tweets, it seems that the avatar of the one on the top of your 'stack' of tweets is used for the Storify's picture. This could be a bit annoying but I haven't investigated it yet - an obvious way to get around this is to add in a tweet of your own and use your avatar... but not ideal.

6. When you search on Storify for a set of tweets, eg a hashtag, the most recent tweet is at the top in the panel on the left. If you want your story to start from the beginning then the trick is (if starting from the top) to drop each tweet on the top of the next one, to reverse the order.

On my computer it's easier to wait 24 hours so that all the tweets are properly timestamped (see point 4) because Storify can be a bit fiddly to use on a very small laptop.

7. I think I might have just spotted a way to get a bit more granularity in Storify. I'm currently creating a record of #streettalks (Harry Rutter's talk on making cities more active-friendly) and am working from a rough draft which has ALL the tweets bunged in from a Twitter search.

While in edit mode, clicking on the S button in the panel on the left (which lets you search within Storify stories) for #streettalks brings up my story and I can drag the entire thing in to the panel on the right. But... I've just discovered that if I click on the Storify result while it's still in the left panel it will unfurl into the entire post, enabling me to pick out the individual elements (ie the tweets). If you hover over the link it does actually say "click to view the elements of this story".

In the pic below I've clicked on the S, highlighted by an orange circle, then typed #streettalks into the search bar and pressed 'get stories'; what shows up is a single result which is my Storify based on the #streettalks hashtag. If I hover over the link it invites me to click to view the elements, which I then did... and in the second panel you can see the entire Storify story unfurled and with all the individual tweets available for adding to the panel on the right to create a new story.

I expect there's more to follow...

Google Realtime: Finding threaded conversations on Twitter as well as year old tweets

Shortened link for this post is http://is.gd/C9vfjG

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UPDATE 7 July 2011: Google Realtime is no longer with us. Initially it seemed to be temporarily offline while under-bonnet tinkering happened and it was assumed it would be hooked up with Google+ however it now seems that Google is no longer accessing Twitter's stream as the deal ended on 2 July 2011. This isn't great.

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1. Google Realtime

2. Storify

3. Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive

4. Library of Congress

1. Google Realtime is probably intended to let people watch tweets as they happen but a nice feature is that it can "re-run" older tweets from as far back as April 2010. I found tweets from me / sent to me back in 18 April 2010 by searching for both jobrodie and @jobrodie

An example or two

BoraZ, from 25 April 2010
"Yes, @JoBrodie I tell new Twitterers to import tweets into FriendFeed as the only reliable way to search old tweets years later."
We've agreed this is probably no longer true as FriendFeed's search is a bit unpredictable.

@MarkSpoff tweeted this on 7 October 2010
"@JoBrodie recording of ambient and other found sound is old as hills. Only now are the social tools there that make it something all can do."

@EvidenceMatters tweeted this, on 1 April 2011, about a 'hack your own sous-vide' event.
"@JoBrodie It was very interesting & it was good to meet diverse ple who attended. @mriemenschneidr was fund of experience/knowledge."
picked from this selection of tweets from Google Realtime's sesarch.

Threaded conversations
I think the bit that's really interesting about Google Realtime is its capacity to capture threaded conversations, even including people that you might not have been conversing with directly, but who were still contributing a conversational aside to the topic as a whole.

From @EvidenceMatters tweet above, the Realtime search results also have a 'Full conversation link' which gives this result.

A longer version is the result of a search for a conversation happening earlier today among @xtaldave @diamondlightsou and @clsresoff. The range of tweets can be found here, and selecting one of the 'Full conversation' links results in this thread, also shown below (in miniature).



I wonder if people will use Storify to capture tweets now that "What the hashtag" is no longer with us.

2. Storify and other curating tools

Storify lets you compile tweets (and other units of information, eg photos from Flickr, bits and bobs from Google, posts to Facebook groups - anything public basically) and compose a story around them. I suppose it's feasible to collect tweets as they come in, on a topic or with a hashtag, and save them as a Storify story.

"The New Curators: Weaving Stories from the Social Web" - this blog has a section on Storify and explains its use well. A nice example of the sort of use I'd put Storify to has been demonstrated by @kristinalford working with tweets from the #onsci tag.

"Onsci: Telling Better Science Stories" curated by Kristin Alford

I liked Storify the minute I saw it, it's very intuitive, has a nice interface and is easy to play around with. It takes a wee while to get your beta invite once you've registered so if you want to play around with something instantly, try the similar Keepstream. Here's an example I've just created. I prefer the interface and options given in Storify but this isn't bad. I didn't manage to get anywhere with Curated.By however.

These tools, rather than letting you find threaded conversations, let you create them from disparate units - according to the New Curators blog post linked above Robert Scoble has used the term "atoms" of information, and described curators as "information chemists" ;)

3. The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive

I've mentioned this before but I think it bears repeating. It doesn't let you find threaded conversations but it does let you see a random selection of your historic tweets - what's available will depend on when the archive crawled your tweets. My timeline has been visited six times over three years taking a snapshot of what was going on at the time it visited.

My tweets were first 'snapped' on 23 December 2008, and then another five times since.

http://waybackmachine.org/*/http://twitter.com/JoBrodie - on the first crawl I was following and followed by 66 people and had made 333 tweets. Here I am again on 21 September 2009. Unfortunately it doesn't let you go back and forwards in your timeline as you can (to a limited extent) on Twitter itself.

It's as if all your tweets were packed up at the end of the day into slim volumes but a year later you were only allowed to look at one of them... still, it's interesting to see some old tweets.

4. Library of Congress

The US Library of Congress has been given all public tweets, by Twitter, since 2006 - but I don't know know if it's possible for people to access this database yet, or ever. The linked blog (Twitter's) refers to Google Replay which is what's now known as Google Realtime, having previously spent time as Google Updates.