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One of the biggest problems with social media services like Twitter is that it’s hard to get information out of them. Sure, you can download everything you’ve ever tweeted as JSON and CSV files, but after a while that gets large, and it’s hard to search — even when you take advantage of tools like Microsoft’s Power BI to explore your archive.
Like many other technology writers, I find Twitter a useful tool for keeping tabs on news and information from various companies that I track, using built-in tools like lists to see what’s being said and by whom. You can often find useful pointers to software and SDKs, as well as to obscure pieces of documentation that solve complex problems. I’ve taken to using Twitter’s favoriting tools as a way of bookmarking the content I want to look at later, but favorited tweets don’t end up in your archive, and it’s near-impossible to search them on Twitter itself.
It’s an itch that I needed to scratch — but one that was very personal and unlikely to be of much use to many other people. How, then, to turn that itch into software?
A simple no-code application running on Zapier, linking two very different cloud services.
Luckily, we’re in the golden age of software development, with tools and ways of working that make much of this very easy indeed, building on the growing world of APIs and web services. For my problem, Twitter’s APIs come in handy, along with a selection of no-code-based web services that take the output of one web service and deliver it into the inputs of another. I’ve written about them in the past, starting with the original (and now sadly missed) Yahoo! Pipes.
My initial experiments with automated social media archiving were flawed, as I made one fundamental mistake. Instead of concentrating on how I was going to consume the data, I quickly chose a familiar tool as my endpoint, and then spent time looking into how to collect the data I wanted.
IFTTT and Flow
OneNote was also one of the first applications to offer API access to If This Then That (IFTTT). One of the earliest of the current generation of no-code API connectors, IFTTT had a very flexible set of triggers based on the Twitter APIs. I could quickly set up a couple of different rules, one to handle everything I posted as a test archive, and one that archived everything I favorited. The problem here was, of course, that I’d missed significant limitations in my target platform.
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