If you’re a power Twitter user and don’t appreciate your 140 character gems being tossed by Twitter after you hit your 3,000th tweet, there’s a solution. This is also helpful for people who have lots of followers and/or follows.
By using GTalk and Dustin Sallings’ Twitterspy you can capture your stream in near-real time and have it save to your inbox. Here’s how to do it:
- Enable chat and chat logging in GMail: Go to Settings, then Chat. Be sure you’ve selected “Save Chat History” under the “My Chat History” option.
- Add twitterspy@jabber.org as a contact.
- Send the word “help” to Twitterspy to receive a list of commands. You can use “track” to track a specific term (But note that this is not real-time track — Dustin is hitting the Twitter Search API with whatever delays may exist), you can post from the GTalk window, too, once you enable autopost. You can get help with any command by sending the word help ahead of the command name.
- Once you’ve set it up, GTalk will automatically save your stream in the “chat” folder in GMail. It will also continue to record while you’re away, as long as you have a GTalk open.
So, what’s the benefit? To me, it’s the fastest and most integrated way to use Twitter. I follow 1600 people, which means that clients like TWhirl will drop tweets, though it will capture replies. Conversation is important to me. I want to know what’s happening, not just with me but with the people I follow. I just don’t always have time to watch it in real time, and don’t want to lose it to the microverse because I have other areas where I need to place my attention.
It’s not a solution for everyone, but it is a solution that works. If you’re an identi.ca user, you can add Identispy to GTalk by adding this contact: laconica@west.spy.net and sending “help” as a message. I recommend it for anyone who wants archives that stretch beyond the current Twitter limits.
One other thing: I really don’t care for the GMail chat in the GMail window at all. So I downloaded Google’s GTalk client, but you can also do this using Pidgin or Digsby.
