I’m a big fan of Twitter. It serves as a useful tool connecting people who might never meet, and also as a vital means of communication for those who work at home or in solitary conditions.
The one huge and uncomfortable problem I see with Twitter is, “What happens to the conversation if Twitter fails?” What will you do if Twitter goes out of business tomorrow? Where will all your conversations, all the links you posted, and received from your friends be? That’s why I wrote Tweet Tweet.
Tweet Tweet is a plugin for WordPress that will archive your tweets, and the tweets of everyone you follow, plus replies you receive from strangers, and direct messages too. All these tweets will be stored safely in your database.
There is a simple “review pane” where you can see the latest tweets and go back in history but it’s very basic. The primary aim of this plugin is to ensure that your conversations are safe.
The plugin has been tested by a number of users, but it uses jQuery and AJAX techniques for the review pane so I’d love to hear if it works for you.
Please, do not hack the plugin to poll Twitter more than once every 90 seconds. Unless you follow thousands of others, 90 seconds will be fine. I have mine set to 180 seconds and it picks up every single tweet.
Update! I just tagged version 0.2 which adds a better hover for the review pane (and makes it IE6 compatible), and also adds a search form to make it easier to navigate your Tweet archive.
31 Comments
Rick (1 comments.) on August 14, 2008 at 5:39 pm.
Nice idea, and I’m intrigued enough to put it to work. Does this operate from your WP blog, or from just within the dashboard itself?
Eats Wombats (4 comments.) on August 14, 2008 at 5:56 pm.
Wow. What a great idea. I’ve resisted this thing as long as I can but have decided it’s worth a go. Am using Tweetdeck for now but a WP plugin seems a nice cloud-centric way to go.
Go raibh maith agat.
EW
Chris (2 comments.) on August 14, 2008 at 6:25 pm.
Looks cool, and I’ll definitely be giving it a go.
But doesn’t Twitter Tools (Alex King) also archive tweets… as well as allowing you to post and display them on the front of the blog? So couldn’t the “review pane” just as easily have been an extension of Twitter Tools (to prevent the need for using 2 plugins that do many of the same things)?
Maybe I should try the plugin out before I comment any more… there may be an obvious reason why
lambic (1 comments.) on August 14, 2008 at 6:47 pm.
I’m guessing this could easily be ported to use http://identi.ca too. Identica fits the WordPress philosophy better than Twitter
Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 14, 2008 at 7:13 pm.
Twitter Tools only records your own tweets, not the tweets of others. That’s the main difference!
Neil (10 comments.) on August 14, 2008 at 7:28 pm.
Great idea mate, this will come in very handy.
geckorange (1 comments.) on August 14, 2008 at 10:33 pm.
Nice, I’ll try it.
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Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 15, 2008 at 10:42 am.
Does Twitter lose tweets a lot? Nathaliemc complained yesterday morning that her last tweet disappeared. I didn’t think of it until today, but I went searching through my archive table and found her missing tweet:
“Home sweet, warm, sweet home. Twittering with my right hand, holding my month old nephew with my left!”
Matthias (1 comments.) on August 15, 2008 at 10:59 am.
Nice. But why archiving it on your own blog and tweeting from the Dashboard? Twiddict is a service that was developped just to make sure the conversation doesn’t die down…
Jon Clayton (1 comments.) on August 15, 2008 at 11:50 am.
Great plugin. Thanks!
Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 15, 2008 at 12:26 pm.
Matthias – They do something completely different. They don’t archive your tweets and those you follow.
You can’t post tweets from “Tweet Tweet”. It’s simply there to make sure your conversations are never lost.
Am I too paranoid?
Collin (15 comments.) on August 15, 2008 at 1:11 pm.
I make the assumption that you’d be able to use this to follow conversations (even if you can’t reply) from machines where you can’;t get to Twitter (like my work machines!) then. Ok, you can’t post to Twitter, but it’s better than nothing – especially as Twitter has disabled text updates in the UK.
Nice work Donncha!
Jim (1 comments.) on August 15, 2008 at 2:13 pm.
Great idea for a plugin! One problem I’m having, though, is with the review pane. I’d like the option to resize the pane and be able to move it around the screen as needed. As it sits right now, it overlaps my dashboard navigation menu and I have to turn it off in order to be able to reach anything on the right side. If it helps, I’m also using the Remove Max Width and Ozh Admin Dropdown Menu plugins, so I don’t have that right-hand buffer area that’s the default in the WordPress 2.6.x dashboard.
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ardhinugraha (1 comments.) on August 15, 2008 at 11:44 pm.
You pick a funny name, i love it “tweet tweet”. I’ll try it.
Alex (1 comments.) on August 15, 2008 at 11:46 pm.
Yep, this was exactly my motivation as well:
http://alexking.org/blog/2007/03/06/twitter-archiver-behavior
I’m looking into identi.ca support as well.
I think it’s great that this does more than just your tweets – responses are something I’ve been planning to add as well.
c.k. (1 comments.) on August 16, 2008 at 7:26 am.
Hmm… just tried activating the plugin and got this error:
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare fetch_rss() in /…/wp-content/plugins/tweet-tweet/tweet-tweet.php on line 96
any ideas?
Cheers,
C.K.
Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 16, 2008 at 9:50 am.
C.K. – you must have fetch_rss() defined in some other plugin, or another plugin that uses wp-includes/rss.php ?
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kpss (1 comments.) on August 16, 2008 at 1:58 pm.
thanks.Am using Tweetdeck for now but a WP plugin seems a nice cloud-centric way to go.
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Amaterashu (1 comments.) on August 18, 2008 at 6:17 am.
I’ll try your tweet tweet
and inform you if I have any bugs
thankss
Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 18, 2008 at 12:23 pm.
Just released version 0.2, now with a search box, and a better hover which is IE6 compatible!
Otto (15 comments.) on August 18, 2008 at 4:19 pm.
I have to ask the same question as Chris does above. Twitter Tools basically archives your tweets by storing them in a table in your WP database as well. This seems to be duplicating functionality here.
Not that I’m against that or anything, but it seems to me that this could be turned into a simpler “display” plugin to go along with the Twitter Tools plugin, which already saves this stuff locally.
Donncha (1707 comments.) on August 19, 2008 at 9:37 am.
Otto – but Twitter Tools doesn’t archive the tweets of those you follow. You only get half the conversation.
Andy Beard (1 comments.) on August 28, 2008 at 9:52 pm.
What are the implications running this on MU?
Brian Arnold (1 comments.) on September 3, 2008 at 2:36 am.
I feel somewhat confused as to why this would be a WordPress plugin. I will also admit that I haven’t installed and tried it yet.
It’s kind of timely to run across this post, because I’ve been thinking of installing Twitter Tools by Alex King. That tool does only archive your side and not what others are saying, but looks to provide more blog hooks. With Tweet Tweet, am I able to do anything like summaries of my tweets and put them into a daily/weekly/monthly post or anything, or is it strictly an archiver?
If it’s just an archiver, I’m not exactly sure why it’d be good for a WordPress plugin, but perhaps rather just done as a standalone app?
I’m not bashing it at all. I generally quite like the work you do. If it were radio or something like that, I’d be all “long time listener, first time caller”. I’m just curious why it’s in WP if it’s strictly an archiver.
If it’s not and it has these features and I just haven’t seen them yet, let me know that too. hehe. 
Donncha (1707 comments.) on September 3, 2008 at 12:15 pm.
Brian – As well as archiving it now sends sms alerts to Irish Meteor and Vodafone customers when they get replies and/or direct messages. I made it into a WP plugin simply because it’s the most convenient framework for me to work with, but it could quite easily be a standalone app too!
Thanks for coming out of the woodwork and commenting!
Chomps (1 comments.) on March 17, 2010 at 7:23 pm.
It is very stupid that the Wii doesn’t have DVD playback damn they piss me off, so at least they could have playback like media player software so that we can use a external hard drive and stuff just like they are talking about on Wii-demand in facebook because that is lame bro. After joining wii demand I got pissed off about what they are doing with the Wii and treating us all like kids. We can’t do as much stuff as the ps3 or xbox, and the graphics are lower so they should give us a trade off for that. You can’t use your Wii speak to talk to everyone even if you are a over 18 and that sucks, and if my friends don’t have a wii or a wii speak then I cant use it at all. I hate it!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wii-Demand/184865307271?ref=ts