Using Twitter to record baby milestones? Use Tumblr for tweet backup and safekeeping.

In response to my latest PC.com article, Family-Friendly Twitter Tips, Erica passed along this extremely smart followup:

I recently noticed that Twitter doesn’t save your tweets indefinitely—it appears that it only saves 10 pages' worth of tweets [for non-Twitter users, "tweets" are your individual Twitter entries. -- Ed.]. This is largely not a problem but I wanted to warn you in case you (or other parents) were planning on saving all those little milestones through Twitter. A parent might be really upset to find out down the line that their important moments were lost.

Here is how I get around that: I sync my Twitter account up with a Tumblr blog. This way, each tweet is saved as a Tumblr post and there are no archive issues. You can go back and search as far as you want, but still use Twitter for the immediacy.

Setting up a Tumblog takes seconds, and directing your Twitter feed into Tumblr takes a couple more seconds. Here's how:

1. Go to Tumblr and sign up for an account.
2. At the top of the Welcome page, click the Customize link.
3. At the top of the Customize page, click the Feeds tab
4. In the "Automatically import my..." dropdown menu, choose Twitter, and then enter your Twitter username in the field that appears, then click the "Start importing this feed" button.

You're done! You never have to look at your Tumblog again -- although you may find yourself using it as a quick repository for links, pictures and other little bits of info.

Related:
PC.com: Family-friendly Twitter Tips
Use Twitter as a baby-album-of-sorts
Use Twitter to keep up with family members

Comments

[Archivist Alison]

The thing is about this Parent Hack...Tumblr doesn't allow you to export your tumblog entries. At all. So, you may be saving your tweets to your tumblog, but there they will remain forever, or until Tumblr disappears one day (unless Tumblr adds a feature).

[Shannon @Babiesonline]

OR (shameful promotion ensues) you could create a Babies Online account and save your journal and milestones in a warm fuzzy fashion ... you can always tweet the updates :)

[Peter]

I've been using LoudTwitter to do the same thing. Except in this case it takes the tweets, makes a post, and publishes it to my Blogger blog. So I ultimately retain all the data.

[Erica]

Thank you so much for posting this! Really there are a lot of aggregators you can use to store the tweets, but I was mostly just worried that people didn't realize that they weren't stored indefinitely on the Twitter site. :)

[Parent Hacks Editor]

Archivist Allison: Indeed. I had a note in to Tumblr support about just this issue -- export. They don't have it! (I was very surprised to find this out.)

I love Tumblr for its simplicity but lack of export is a real problem.

[Brant]

My wife and I have been using Tumblr as a mini picture blog for some time now. Our family and friends love it and we enjoy using it. We do most of our posting via camera phone and treat it as a lo-fi picture blog. We use a Flickr account for our DSLR and posed pictures.

[Doll Clothes Gal]

Great tip if you want to safe your tweets indefinately.

[Becoming a Millionaire]

I think that twitter is getting way too overrated... to the point where people are using it for everything.

[Kate]

My solution to this same problem is to use a Twitter client called OutTwit (http://www.techhit.com/OutTwit/). It can be used as a full-fledged Twitter client, but I just use it to automatically save all my tweets to a special archive folder in Outlook. This has the added bonus of putting tweets within the reach of my Google Desktop search.

[ceejayoz]

The bit about Twitter not storing tweets forever is inaccurate. My first tweet is still available at http://twitter.com/ceejayoz/status/4383263 (early 2007), despite having posted 3,728 more since then.

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