In this case you need to find ways that you can have that data backed up locally and accessible to you if the service doesn’t archive older data or makes it difficult get it. This post covers several options that include the ability to backup Twitter, Facebook and other services as well.

WordPress & Drupal

I personally have been using the WP Lifestream Plugin on my personal WordPress blog for the last few years. This plugin allows me to import data from 40 services including Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and even generic RSS feeds. Once you add these services it then creates individual records for every item each time it imports data.  This in turn is then creating records for the data in your WordPress database. I periodically will export my WordPress MySQL database to my local machine which at that point provides me with an archive of all my social media data generated from the services I’m importing. This is a good way to do this fairly painlessly if you already have a WordPress blog.  If you only want to backup Twitter then another good plugin you can use is Twitter Tools.

Admin Screen for WP Lifestream Plugin

If you are a Drupal user then there are 2 modules that are similar to the Lifestream plugin above that you can use. The first is Activity Stream which is very similar but supports a lower number of services but does include Twitter and Facebook. The second is Feeds which is not specific to services, just RSS feeds but is much more flexible and powerful.

There are many other blogging platforms out there that I’m sure offer extensions to do this as well so if you’re not using either of these you should research similar options which should be available.

Backupify

This service originally started out a few years ago called Lifestream Backup with a focus specifically to backup your social media data. Besides backing up Twitter and Facebook it has since matured quite a bit and branched out to cover many other services including Gmail, Google Apps, and Basecamp. It’s really easy to setup, just create an account and link up your services. Once you’ve set up what you want to back up you can set the frequency to daily or weekly. The system will then create individual backup files of several different pieces of data from the service you connect. For instance in the case of Twitter you will get daily backups of your tweets, mentions, friends and more. The individual files are in XML format so you could open them up in a browser, editor, or Excel if you wanted to do manipulate the data. Beyond that they also offer a PDF of the backup data that provides a very nicely organized way to review your Twitter data.

PDF Generated by Backupify

Google Reader

If you want to get a little more technical and aren’t afraid to delve into the world of RSS then you open up a whole world of possibilities when it comes to what you can do with your Twitter and any other accounts that provide feeds. Unfortunately Facebook is locked out of this method as they don’t provide any feeds of your data at the current time. One of the simpler and more powerful ways is to pull your feeds into Google Reader. This is my favorite, and arguably best RSS reader available based on the archiving, search and social features available within it.

Twitter Feed Search Results in Google Reader

Link to Twitter RSS Feed

In the case of Twitter you first have to locate your RSS feed. This is fairly simple. Just login to Twitter and click on your profile link. You will now see all of your tweets and if you look on the lower right hand side just below the list of people you are following, you will see that very recognizable little orange icon with a link to your RSS feed. Note that there are feeds for your tweets and favorites only but not DM’s, mentions, or retweets. Now go add that feed to your Google Reader account and now you will be archiving your tweets there and for an added bonus they will be searchable. I’m not sure of how far back they will archive your tweets but in doing a test for this post I was able to use a search term to find a tweet from December of 2008.

Lifestream Software & Services

All of the above options offer some pretty straightforward approaches but beyond them there are many other options available with varying degrees of these features in the form of software and services available for Lifestreaming. FriendFeed provides similar functionality to Google Reader with regards to archiving whatever feeds you import and allowing you to search them, although you won’t be able to export the data. Storytellr & SweetCron are open source platforms you can install yourself which similarly to WordPress will store your data as records in their database. If you want to build an engine to backup and output your data in even more flexible ways there are many Yahoo Pipes options I have found. You can see a full list of all the software, services, and tools I’ve compiled for Lifestreaming here.

Bonus link

If you’re looking specifically for methods to backup Twitter I want to share this roundup that Sarah Perez created over at ReadWriteWeb of several other good options as well

So you’re asking what the hell does that have to do with Lifestreaming right? Well tonight I saw a new Motorola Cliq commercial that really caught my attention because it took the approach of showing what amounted to a literal Lifestream. I won’t explain it because I’ve embedded the video below.

While not the same premise as the music videos I found the correlation interesting nonetheless and a good excuse to share the music videos. A little over a month ago I wrote about the announcement of the Motorola Cliq and now it’s been released. You can learn more on their new site here where they have a video that specifically states ”see your entire Life in a single Stream”. They also seem to have a simulator available that you can play with.

I haven’t followed much more beyond this information on the Motorola Cliq but it’s the first Android powered phone by them and their implementation looks nice and definitely has a strong emphasis on Lifestreaming so it’s probably worth checking out. I’m hoping to run across someone who has one soon so I can play with it.

It will import status updates and allow you to reply and post both to Twitter and Facebook separately. You can also filter all your imported feed data by keyword, service, or friends lists from the main interface. There are 3 different types of views available for the feed which offer some unique differences from other clients I have used.

There are also dedicated interfaces for your Flickr and YouTube accounts that are presented in a great looking interface. In fact the interface and presentation throughout is one of the things that makes this app standout. Besides allowing you to view your imported photos and videos, the app offers the ability to upload to Flickr and YouTube as well with a fancy drag and drop interface.

Probably the most unique and gorgeous feature as well is the profile mode which creates an awesome content mashup of your data that you can customize and even embed as a widget on your own blog. This feature alone is worth the price of admission. So as you can see the app is pretty different and offers a combination of features that I haven’t seen before.

I only skimmed the surface (pun intended) and I really need to dig in more. There is already quite a bit of coverage on the app which I have linked to below. I just wanted to provide some quick info. In my short time with the app I recommend you download now and check it out. Well worth it just to play with the different and wonderful interface.

Read about Skimmer elsewhere

• Skimmer brings your social streams to the desktop – Webware
• Skimmer: Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites – Mashable
• Skimmer Brings a Sleek New Look to Social Browsing – ReadWriteWeb
• Fallon Launches ‘Life-streaming’ Tool – AdWeek

Site: Martin Gardner
Code: Custom

Site: Pinar
Code: Custom

Site: Aline
Code: Lifespot & FriendFeed

Site: Mr. Yap
Code: Flickr & Twitter API with CSS, XHTML, and JSON

Site: Ryan Parr
Code: Custom

Setting up an account begins like any other Lifestreaming service by adding your accounts from social media sites. They currently support Delicious, Flickr, Google Reader, Last.fm, Picasa, Qik, Seesmic, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, and the ability to add additional RSS feeds. You also have the ability to manually create posts in the categories of status, blog, link, image and audio, the last two of which are based on uploading the assets to their site.

The Storytell feature allows you to convey a single story by aggregating data from Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter based on a specific date range. Once configured, it then creates a custom overlayed media show displaying each of the items as a “boxy” mashup. This offers a nice gallery view that isolates the content by a single experience in a nice visual manner. I tried creating one but didn’t have proper content to adequately create a “story”. In creating mine I didn’t see the ability to flag which items should be part of the story based on the date ranges. I would think this would be necessary as some items that aren’t relevant would more than likely sneak in.

Click to view

While that feature is very nice, Storytlr offers many other great things. The Lifestream page itself can be most likened to one you would create using WordPress and a Lifestreaming plugin. You can choose from several included themes as well as provide a custom header image, background image, and title for the Lifestream. But wait, there’s more. They offer a “widget” section that offers almost the same functionality as that of WordPress with regards to providing the functionality in the sidebar. You have the ability to display and re-arange functions such as search, archives, latest comments, links to your profiles on other services, and even the ability to add your own widgets that can use custom html or javascript. They even offer the ability to host your Lifestream on your own domain.

The data displayed in the Lifestream offers subtle changes depending on the theme you choose. Each item offers the ability for commenting. Comments are then included as part of the latest comments widget in the sidebar. You also can flag individual items as private. There’s an add this function for every item. The Archive that appears in the sidebar is identical to that in WordPress offering the ability to filter items by month and year.

Click to see my page

The last feature they offer is one that I’ve been very interested in with regards to Lifestreaming data. It’s the ablity to provide backups. The current implementation only offers the ability to export data from 10 sources as CSV files, but I like their thinking along these lines. They also state that in the future they will offer the ability to download binary files as well.

Overall I’m very impressed with this service especially considering the resources used to create it. It definitely creates a valueable offering for users interested in creating a customized Lifestream with WordPress-like functionality and flexibility. Definitely worth a look and can only get better over time.

Well apparently Dean is a fan of Lifestreaming because he’s currently developing a new Lifestreaming Plugin for WordPress. Around March of this year, he tried using several Lifestreaming plugins and determined none of them operated quite how he wanted so he decided to write his own.

Dean J Robinsos’s Lifestream

Here’s the details from a development update on 4/6/08

CaptainPlanet is basically a ‘lifestream’ manager for your WordPress blog. Plans are to support a number of popular feeds, which are aggregated (and archived…) for display on you site. Will have an awesome ‘manage’ screen (one of the few bits thats actually working correctly at the moment), and also makes use of the new ‘shortcode’ API in WP2.5. Will also have several built in function that will do away with the need for some of the JS callbacks I currently use for things like Twitter and Flickr.

So not much had appened on the plugin front until an update a few weeks ago on 8/17/08

The return of Captain Planet, bigger and better. Ok so the super rushed dev of the first iteration didn’t go so well. This one should be better with a bit of luck. In the backend its more flexible, allowing you to add whatever feeds you want, its working wonderfully with any feed from Feedburner, but I’m yet to give it a real workout with raw feeds directly from flickr/delicious/twitter etc, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t continue to work.

I’ve also cleaned up the admin (which none of you had seen anyway), and added a few ‘helper’ functions (with more to come). For example, the latest tweet show at the top of each page, and the recent flickr images on the homepage are both generated out of Captain Planet, no more waiting for external javascript on each load.

I’ve already had a couple of request from people who’d like to test it, which is great, and once I’ve gotten to a point what I’m happy for that to happen I let them in on the fun.

And here we are now in September and still no Plugin. This seems like a project worthy of anticipation. I really hope that he’s close to releasing it as this could be a very nice addition to the existing library of Lifestreaming plugins available for WordPress.

Tumblr

Last year in my coverage I came across a very similar service called Soup.io which I feel offers richer options, support for more services, and great flexibility. If you are a fan of Tumblr, you owe it to yourself to take a look at Soup.io.

Today, Richard MacManus proclaimed it’s currently one of his favorite web services. Andy Desoto who has been writing quite a bit about Lifestreaming lately picked up on the Soup.io mention at RWW today and wrote up a good review.

Here’s a snip:

If you’ve known about this service for quite some time now, feel free to move along; released in the last quarter of 2007, it’s hardly new, especially in the rapid-fire world of Web 2.0 startups.  But if you’ve never heard of it like I hadn’t, read along: soup.io just might be what you’re looking for.

You can read the rest of Andy’s review here.

Her footer shows the different sources that make up her “Life Feed” with a section titled “built and rebuilt feeds”. She is using Yahoo Pipes and leveraging screen shots from Web Snapr as well.

She states that a write-up and tutorial for how she created it will be available in the future. We look forward to it!

You can view her Life Feed here

For those of you in this quandry the proverbial killing two birds with one stone has been delivered with the new WP-Profilactic WordPress plugin written by Anish H. Patel. It makes it very easy to host your own rich Lifestream on your own site. All you have to do is create an account and build your Lifestream on Profilactic where you can add from their unmatched support for up to 175 sites to your Lifestream.

After you’re done with the account creation you just download & install the plugin, provide your Profilactic account credentials, and then add a small snippet of code to a new template file or use the one provided. Yes, it’s that easy, no muss, no fuss. You also have the option of customizing the plugin with some options regardin number of posts to display, colors, etc.

You can check out a rich example of the plugin in action with 28 services on author Anish Patel’s site here. Also, be sure to check out my Profilactic page here.  And if you want to keep up to date on Profilactic and their never ending service additions you can follow user Profilactic on Twitter.