Twitter fans listen up! Today Microsoft released a great new tool called The Archivist which allows you to create archives of Twitter topics for saving, exporting, and analysis.
Why might you need this? If you’re interesting in monitoring your own Twitter activity to see what you tweet about, when, and from where, The Archivist can give you instant access to all kinds of fascinating information. If you follow certain topics on Twitter (like your company name or the town where you live) and would like to keep a record of what gets said, by whom, and when, The Archivist can do this for you. Or, if you’re just plain nosey and want to find out what someone else (maybe your neighbour or a competitor) is up to, The Archivist can help too.
To get started: Go to http://archivist.visitmix.com, sign in to your Twitter account, and create your first search. Initially Twitter only returns results from the last week so remember to save your archive to instruct The Archivist to continue silently monitoring all Twitter activity. Now sit back and have a nice cup of tea, safe in the knowledge that The Archivist is collecting the data you need to revisit at any point in the future. Before long you’ll have collected enough tweet data to produce some pretty funky analysis.
Let me know how you get on and if you find this helpful.