Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Introducing tweetvaultHQ

So I thought it was about time I wrote about my latest pro­ject: tweetvaultHQ. It launched a couple of weeks ago, and now things have settled down I’ve got time to write a bit about it and what the launch was like.

tweetvaultHQ is a hos­ted Twitter archiv­ing ser­vice. Some time last year I got tired of not being able to effect­ively search my own tweet his­tory (Twitter’s global search only goes back a few days, and there’s no per-profile search — you have to just keep paging through the timeline), and I thought it would be handy to have my own saved copy of my tweets. I’d also been doing quite a bit with the Twitter API at work, so I figured I’d build something.

Someone then sug­ges­ted that a hos­ted ver­sion of that early app might be pop­u­lar, so I refact­ored the code to sup­port mul­tiple users, added a bunch of fea­tures and was even­tu­ally in a pos­i­tion where I could demo the app at London Devnest at the begin­ning of this month. I got a really encour­aging response from the audi­ence there and the pub­lic beta of tweetvaultHQ went live a few days later.

So what’s it all about, then? Well, tweetvaultHQ saves your tweets and favour­ites in an eas­ily search­able archive. It will grab your tweets as far back into his­tory as the Twitter API allows (cur­rently 3200 tweets, hope­fully more in the future), and grab all your favour­ites. As well as being able to search these col­lec­tions, the app also presents a bunch of awe­some stats on your Twitter activ­ity, includ­ing graphs of tweets by month and a heat­map of your most act­ive tweet­ing times dur­ing the day and week.

There’s also an export util­ity so you can get your data out — in CSV, JSON, HTML and plain text. The JSON format emu­lates Twitter’s own, mean­ing you can feed exports into other applic­a­tions that con­sume Twitter data, should you wish.

tweetvaultHQ uses a sub­scrip­tion model, with a month’s usage cost­ing only £1 (or local equi­val­ent). You can eval­u­ate the app in trial mode (which retrieves up to 100 of your tweets and 24 favour­ites), or while we’re still in beta you can use the code THQBETA for a month’s free subscription.

Launching my first paid app has been a fant­astic exper­i­ence, cul­min­at­ing in the Devnest present­a­tion — the response to which was incred­ibly inspir­ing. The feed­back I’ve received on the app so far has been very con­struct­ive and I’m hop­ing user num­bers will con­tinue to grow as more people find out about it.

So, check it out, sign up and see what you think. You can fol­low the tech blog for info on updates as they hap­pen. If you like the app, tell your friends or tweet or blog about it — your friends can use the above code as well for as long as the beta period lasts. I’ve got some big plans for the future of tweetvaultHQ and hope­fully its suc­cess will only grow.