How to share your Twitter archive via your public Dropbox

This is a lot easier than I thought it was going to be, and it worked instantly. I'm still investigating the 'ethics' side of sharing all four plus years of my tweets publicly - not that I've said anything terribly exciting but I might need to think about the people I've intereacted with*. So I'm not sharing the link to my tweets quite yet.

You will need

• a Twitter account, obviously
• a Dropbox account, or similar sort of shared file area that lets you share files publicly
  https://www.dropbox.com
  or https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTQwMDAxMDQ5 - this is my referrer link

1. Think about tweets you've sent and whether there's anything in there that might embarrass your friends, let alone yourself. Just because you can now share your past tweet history it doesn't mean that you should.

Download
2. If you've not downloaded your Twitter archive you'll need to do that first. Go to your Settings page or if you're logged in just click https://twitter.com/settings/account, scroll down the page until you see the 'Request your archive' link, click that and wait for an email to arrive. Once it arrives click on the link to download a zipped file of your tweets and accessory information (making them look nice on screen and searchable). Unzip the file.

Further details on downloading and playing with your Twitter archive can be found here.

2.5. Double click on index.html and your offline Twitter archive will open. You can search your old tweets and see what's there, or browse by clicking on the month in the panel on the right. Each tweet gives you the option to view the 'live' version on Twitter - where you can delete it if you wish, or copy its URL / embed it into blog posts or Storify etc.

Make available to others
3. Move the 'tweets' folder into your Public folder in Dropbox.
Might as well move all of the folder contents but I may work out which are the minimum essential files to move - to be honest the readme.txt file doesn't really participate in accessing your tweets

4. [Optional] You can rename the tweets folder if you want, not really essential. You can also rename the index.html file - again not essential but if lots of people are sharing their Twitter archives in this way then it doesn't hurt to stick your Twitter name in the address.

Share public link so others can see and search your tweets
6. Right-click / or Ctrl+Click for Mac (not cmd click) on whatever you've now called your index.html to bring up the menu, click on the Dropbox menu option and then 'Copy Public Link' which is now copied to your clipboard and can be pasted in a tweet or blog post or wherever you want to put it.

It will look a bit like: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/12345678/tweets_folder_name/your_name.html#

Once you've shared the link don't change the name of the file on Dropbox - or if you do you'll need to reshare the new link.

*A tweet is not an island. When you click on it to expand or 'view conversation' you can see the discussions that have gone on around it. Of course all these conversations probably happened in the public sphere (given that any tweet sent from a not-locked account is public) but I think it is a little different when you suddenly make the pointers to tweets that are several months or years old more easily available again. That's not to say historic tweets have been particularly well hidden - topsy.com can find all sorts of old stuff.

I don't know if tweets sent four years ago by someone who's since made their account private will now inherit their new privacy status (or vice versa) but I want to find out a little more about it before unleashing all my tweets, and manual RTs of other people's tweets (which will persist even if they've deleted the original) etc.

It would be interesting if I knew how to make this password protected, then could share just with mates and researchers. Don't think that option is available at the level of Dropbox but I'm sure there's a way around it.

Random observations
I wonder if people will have their Twitter archives subpoenaed - it's suddenly become possible for everyone with an account to gain access to all of their previous tweets (including the option to find and delete tweets from much further back than the default 3,200 that you can scroll back through). Presumably far easier to get them from an individual than from Twitter, though I am not a lawyer.

How to do Chirpstory

I use Chirpstory to collect hundreds of tweets relatively quickly. I used to use WTHashtag and Twapperkeeper (both no longer with us - Twapperkeeper recently announced their service was ending). I still use SearchHash and Twilert to capture tweets (these do it automatically and Twilert sends you an email, with SearchHash you have to manually collect a bunch of tweets later). Chirpstory is similar to Storify but for me Chirp has the edge because it lets you collect tweets in pages rather than individually. Here's how I do it.

Summary

• Log into http://chirpstory.com with your Twitter account
• Collect a bunch of tweets, re-order chronologically (optional),
• Delete RTs (optional)
• Publish your collection
• Embed the collection in a blog (optional)

This post assumes you want to collect a bunch of tweets from a hashtag or a user. The user can be you of course.

You can also collect tweets sent to you but don’t forget that because you’ll be logged in to your Twitter account, you’ll see all the tweets you normally see including those from anyone whose account is private / locked. So for this reason you might need to be a bit careful if you’re planning to publish your collected tweets somewhere else, eg by embedding in a blog. Don’t share tweets that aren’t public to everyone.

One really great thing about Chirpstory is that it lets you move a whole page of tweets at once (you don’t have to move them individually!) and a page is about 50 tweets. Generally you can go back about 16 pages (800 tweets) but it varies depending on the number of tweets sent and the time that’s passed – after a week it becomes a lot harder to capture the earlier ones, particularly if many were sent.

1. Go to http://chirpstory.com and log in with Twitter (using the authorisation system that magically works when you’re logged in to Twitter).

2. Once logged in, click on the blue Create Story on the top right hand of the page, shown below.

Click image to enlarge

3. Scroll down below the panel at the top and you’ll see the screen split in two. On the left are your source tweets (initially this is the timeline you’d see if you were logged in to Twitter) and on the right is the panel into which you’re going to put your tweets of interest (target panel).

The first thing to do – unless you want to save the tweets that you’re receiving – is clear your timeline from the source panel on the left, to do this, click on the Clear link highlighted with a dark pink circle in the next picture. You’ll be asked “Do you want to clear this timeline?” – OK it.

Click image to enlarge

4. You now have a blank slate in the source panel, and several options. You can choose to collect tweets relating to you (eg your replies or favourites), from someone else, or from a stream of hashtags.

In the picture above the links marked with a green oval are to do with you, from left:

• User timeline = what you see in your timeline from everyone you follow
• Replies = your @ mentions
• Favorites = tweets you’ve starred.

Clicking any of these will bring up the relevant stream of tweets.

Below that is the search box and the link in the blue oval which relate to others’ tweets, from left:

• Keyword = word, phrase or hashtag
• User = a named person which could be you if you want to collect the tweets that you’ve sent
• List = a Twitter list – you’ll need the full URL for this (eg http://twitter.com/jobrodie/diabetes).

To access these tweets you need to click on the button to the right of the search box which will say Keyword Search (if Keyword button is ticked), User Search (if User ticked) or Load List (if List is ticked).

5. I’m going to assume you want to trap hashtagged tweets. Click in the little radio button next to the Keyword link and then type in your #word of interest into the box, then click Keyword search.

A page of tweets will appear – click the ‘copy all’ button to move all of them (max 50 to a page) into the target panel. If you prefer you can click and drag individual tweets and move them around, you can also click on the X at the top right of any tweet to delete it from the stream.

6. Once you’ve moved all the tweets you want you can click on the ‘More’ link in the source panel (there’s a blue dividing line with white text that will also tell you which page you’re on).

7. Carry on clicking on the More and Copy all links (or transferring individual tweets) until you’ve got all the tweets you want, or no more tweets appear when you press More (this usually happens at about 16 pages which equates to 800 tweets I think).

8. If any tweets are missing (it sometimes happens) you can enter the individual URL for that tweet into the search box on the right hand side (that helpfully says “Enter individual tweet URL”) and then press the Load tweet button – it will appear automatically in the panel on the right. If you’re wondering “what’s the tweet URL?” then you can find this in the timestamp for any tweet, as in the picture below.

Click image to enlarge

All tweets have a timestamp (it might say “3a2 minutes ago” or “7 Dec” or something else but if you hover over it there’ll be a link to the individual tweet (shown at the top of the picture). In the image above first there’s the URL, then the tweet as it appears in the timeline and the lower bit of the image is the tweet as it appears on its own page (whose URL is the one listed at the top).

9. If you want to reorder the tweets so that the earliest appears at the top then click on the little up arrow next to the button marked duplicates. You can remove RTs by pressing the RT button and you’ve probably guesed what the Duplicates button does.

10. Once you’re ready to publish you need to click on the ‘Create Story’ at the bottom of the page and not the one at the top (which basically resets your page – my suggestion to Chirpstory might be to rename these as ‘Create story’ and ‘Publish story’ and also have a ‘Save as Draft’.