Search, Save, and Export Twitter–The Archivist

MIX Online has released a new Azure-hosted lab called The Archivist. The Archivist allows you to create archives of Twitter topics that you can save, export and analyze.

 

There are now over 50,000,000 tweets being created each day. But, tweets are transitory. Twitter itself doesn’t allow access into their database more than two weeks – and for a trending topic, one may not be able to access tweets older than 24 hours. Enter The Archivist, a new lab from Mix Online. It is a website that allows people to archive, analyze and export tweets.

The Archivist can create archives of tweets equivalent to any search done at http://search.twitter.com.  What is the difference between searching directly on Twitter versus searching from The Archivist?  Well, once you save a search from The Archivist, your search will continue to run, day and night, every day, every night, creating an archive for you based on that search.

Once you have started an archive, The Archivist data mines on your behalf, providing six visualizations that offer insight into a given archive of tweets. Any additional data mining you’d like to do can be done by exporting and saving the entire archive, to be manipulated in a program such as Excel.

 

  • Is this a replacement for Bing or Twitter as a Twitter search tool?
    • No. Bing and Twitter are excellent search engines, but The Archivist’s main features are the ability to save, export, and analyze tweets based on a search. The Archivist will also continue to update your archive.
  • How long will you store my tweets?
    • As long as you log in within 60 days of your last log in, we will continue to store your tweets.
  • Hey, I looked at search.twitter.com and The Archivist and they do not match exactly, what’s up?
  • Why did you use Azure?
    • We wanted to take advantage of our cloud offering and the functionality it gave us. It provided background services, scaling, monitoring, database and more.
  • Hey, this is cool, can I build my own version of The Archivist?
    • Absolutely. With all MIX Online labs, we make the code and design assets available for folks to peruse and use in their own apps. In fact, you can also contribute to the project if you like. For more information, please visit the Developers’ page. It will help you get started building services and applications using The Archivist and it’s codebase.
  • What is MIX Online?
    • MIX Online (at http://visitmix.com) is a community site for Designers, Developers and Web Builders. MIX Online provides insights from our team and other industry pros with articles and opinions; free, open source, ready-to-download prototypes and tools from our labs; and we host, speak at and attend lots of industry events.
  • What is a MIX Online Lab?
    • A Lab is a free, open source, ready-to-download tool or website prototype. Labs are not official products from Microsoft (e.g. Microsoft Office, MSN, etc.). Check out our other Labs we have built on our Labs page.

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