It all started out so simple, a while ago recognizing that Twitter does not let you see all of your past tweets, and their search is not the greatest I wanted to have a personal archive of my tweets. My first attempt at this was to use the Twitter Tools for WordPress plugin which automatically creates a blog entry for your tweets based on a schedule (per post, daily, weekly). Unfortunately (well maybe fortunately) it never worked right for me, it either skipped the day altogether, or duplicated the post for the day.
The next attempt at archiving my tweets was using TweetNest running on PHP/MySQL, it took me less then 20 minutes to install and configure it. I set it up last October and it has just been running since. You can view my TweetNest install here, I have not done any customization to it, though it supports customization of the UI. The search feature works really well, and I can usually find any tweet available in the archive quickly.
That is pretty much all there is to TweetNest works as advertised. I don’t know how active development of TweetNest is, it has been on beta version 0.8.2 since I started using it last October.
The next application that came on my radar was ThinkUp, originally created by Gina Trapani, and actively developed as open source project. I started out last fall with beta 0.7 and recently upgraded to beta 0.14, with a full version 1.0 close to being launched.
ThinkUp also runs on PHP/MySQL, I had it installed and configured in about 20 minutes, the upgrades to each new beta release take maybe 5 minutes to complete (though it will depend on the size of your database).
ThinkUp supports archiving of both Twitter and Facebook data, and on the Twitter side will show you your Retweets, most replied to tweets, as well as actually displaying the replies, allowing you to see an entire Twitter conversation in one view.
I use the search capability in ThinkUp fairly often to find information, and it is very helpful to follow a thread when a tweet gets a lot of replies.
I also have a memolane account, and while memolane provides excellent search capability against a number of services, what I like about TweetNest and ThinkUp is I now have an archive of my Tweets, in my own MySQL database so in addition to the export capability in ThinkUp, I have access to my Tweets should I ever want to do anything with them.
Do you archive your tweets or any other social activity? Are you interested in a personal backup of your activity?