I gather the Library of Congress is archiving all Tweets for eternity. AFAIK, however, this isn’t searchable online.
Is there an online searchable archive of older tweets out there? As Twitter more and more becomes an awareness mechanism, it seems more and more imoprtant to keep an eye on it, or at least keep the option to keep an eye on it.
Failing an online searchable archive, is there a way to direct the increasing number of Twitter feeds I think I ought to read, but often actually don’t get around to reading, into some sort of easily searchable pile, ideally with a friendly front-end?
All Twitter feeds produce RSS. You could use an RSS reader to amalgamate the data. That’d be good for the ones you want to read.
A fully searchable archive… that, I don’t know about.
Michael,
You may have seen this already. Here is a link to a blog by a Java developer who has catalogued a number of tools for Tweet archiving and searching. Note that Google also maintains a searchable index that is listed here. Hope this helps or you may want to get in touch with this person to discuss further: http://karussell.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/twitter-search-tools-and-more-archive-usersearch-friendsearch-trends-statistics/
@David thanks for mentioning the article 😉
@Michael: Creating your own entire twitter index isn’t possible because twitter provides only some selected companies the so called ‘firehose’ access. But you can grab 95-100% of the tweets with keywords you are interested in and save them. For that I’ve build jetwick which is scalable (if you have enough servers => you can store the tweets forever ;)). On jetwick.com I’m hosting a version where 1 week is searchable. Jetwick users have the possibility to track keywords (via saved searches) and therefor tweets which do not contain those keywords will be lost … but there are tricks to get a good diversity of tweets. E.g. tracking the keyword ‘RT’ 😉
Another possibility is, like David said, google (real time) or bing social (see post).
If you’re looking for a way to archive your tweets, check out our article The How and Why of a Twitter Archive. It shows how to make an indexable and searchable twitter archive.