Twitter and Facebook and other social networks are in a way microblogs out there. You publish content on someone else’s servers and they hold on to it.
If you ever wish to leave a particular network, all the history of your activity thee is gone… poof!
I think about this all the time and in an effort to save my tweets, I added a subdomain to this site and have been saving all my tweets at twitter.shankrila.com. (I just noticed this had stopped gathering tweets in May 🙁 )
But, what about the other social network platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.?
ThinkUp is an open source project founded by the former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani.
ThinkUp captures your posts, replies, retweets, friends, followers, and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. We’ll be adding more networks in the future. ThinkUp stores your social data in a database you control, and makes it easy to search, sort, filter, export, and visualize in useful ways.
ThinkUp is WordPress-like where in you download the code and run it in your own web server in a public domain (a requirement for Twitter API). You need PHP5 and a MySQL database to store the data collected.
Once installed ThinkUp offers a dizzying array of features to visualize and interact with your social data.
ThinkUp Features
- Archive all of your social data for your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Search, sort and filter the data.
- Export some or all of your data into a spreadsheet
- View all of your friends’ replies to your messages. Even display it in a Google Map if location is enabled.
- View insightful charts of key stats like number of followers, posting behaviours, etc.
- Stream of all photos or links your friends have posted
- Sort replies to your tweets or Facebook status updates by location
- Get insights on followers and friends
- Complete list of replies to your questions. Even integrates with WordPress.
ThinkUp is in beta and continues to add new features. One awesome thing to note about ThinkUp is that it is extendable with plugins. With it being open source, developers can add other social networks like Flickr, Youtube, etc. via plugins.
If you have a web server, download ThinkUp and kick the tires a bit. I am sure gonna do that this week.
When you say local web serer, you are referring to using softwares like WAMP, right?
Looks like a helpful tool for small businesses also.