How-To: Conference Tweets - So, you've just finished a conference, and don't want to lose all those Tweets....

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Comment by John OBrien on April 9, 2010 at 10:14pm

Just stumbled upon this post.

Andrew - to confirm, TwapperKeeper DOES continue to pull the stream after it is created.

It first tries to reach back as far back as the search API allows [1500, 7-10 days] and then pulls data directly from the twitter streaming api going forward (it used to constantly pull from search api with the same desired effect, but now it is more reliable).

If you have any issues, let me know.

p.s. I have been considering a "nice output" but haven't had too many requests for it. Will think about adding to the system.

John
http://twapperkeeper.com
http://twitter.com/jobrieniii
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jobrieniii

Comment by Adriel Hampton on March 10, 2010 at 1:17pm

In addition to grabbing the tweets, when I see a great conference in areas I'm interested in, I want to add those folks to my contacts on Twitter. The easiest way I've found is to use TweepML and just load successive search page links to build a new list. It will of course grab everyone using the tag, not just attendees, but for a quick and dirty list, it's invaluable.
Then you can follow with just a click or two. Haven't seen quite as simple a way to build a list on Twitter (if you don't want to follow everyone), but I've done that manually and there are plenty of hacks for speeding up that process as well (like using a dummy account to follow all, then adding everyone from that list).
Here's the list I built for the Edmonton Open City event.

Comment by Mark Traphagen on March 10, 2010 at 12:06pm

Thanks for posting this. I'm the author of the original post that Bowen is reproducing here. I've since updated the middle with a technique to get ALL of the hashtagged tweets into Reader if you're starting your feed after the hashtag already has a lot of Tweets.

(Alternative, but recommended: Go to TwapperKeeper.com and create an archive for your hashtag. Advantage: the TwapperKeeper feed will pull all of the tagged tweets into Reader, whereas the direct RSS from the Twitter search will only pull in about 25-30 of the most recent Tweets. Once the TwapperKeeper archive is generated, right click on the RSS Feed link and copy its URL.) Then use that URL for the subscription in Reader.

Comment by David Tallan on March 10, 2010 at 9:21am

I've tried this in the past, but have sometimes noticed that my Google reader was not getting all of the tweets. I'm not sure if the situation has improved since then.

Another option is to set up in advance a "Twapper Keeper" for te hashtag for your event.

Comment by GovLoop on March 10, 2010 at 9:07am

Good stuff. Added this to the How-To section on GovLoop...

Comment by Andrew Krzmarzick on March 10, 2010 at 8:40am

Great post, Bowen. Thanks for sharing this process.

This is one of my favorite topics...in fact, it verges on an obsession. :-) Last year after the Open Government and Innovations conference in Washington, DC, a few of us were sitting around saying that we should create a "Tweetbook" of the event...so I posted the idea on GovLoop...and a week later we produced the OGI Tweetbook.

Some of the challenges that we encountered:

1. Took 7-8 people to pull this off...a lot of manual labor.
2. Needed an elegant way to reverse the stream...Yahoo! Pipes doesn't work consistently.
3. Twapper Keeper performs a similar function to Google Reader...but it doesn't continue to pull the stream and it doesn't allow you to download and produce something akin to a tweet book with all the formatting.
4. TweetDoc pulls all the tweets into a nice book...but limited you to 500 tweets.

A couple questions about Google Reader:

- Does it flip the stream and put it in real chrono order?
- Does it retain the formatting so that you can pull images for the purpose of including in a "Tweet Book"

I can't believe a developer hasn't produced something that allows you to quickly flip the tweet stream and display it in an attractive way....I'd put up some of my own money to make it happen!

Thanks again.

Comment by Scott Horvath on March 10, 2010 at 5:22am

To add to this, many people...especially agencies...want to export that tweetstream to a permanent XML file which they can post to their own site as an archive...or for other reasons.

To export the stream of tweets, from everything that Google Reader has, simply click on the feed you want to export within Google Reader, then copy the URL at the top and modify it like so:

From:
https://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F...

to:

https://www.google.com/reader/atom/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Fandrewpwilso...