[This is an updated post!]
Twitter is a great resource, but once you follow a couple hundred people and don’t sit glued to it all day, it can become overwhelming. I’ve devised a way that works for me to keep track of my followers.
It’s home-brew, hackish, and not for everyone. But it’s the sort of stuff I like to faff around with.
Here’s an overview of the process.
- I run
ttytter, an awesome console Twitter client. I run it underscreenon a remote server, so I’m always “connected”. - I’ve written an extension to
ttytterthat saves every tweet to a file, named after the date. The extension is based on the example “A Twitter logger” here. - Every hour, I run a perl script that parses the twitter logs, and publishes them in one entry per hour as a Blosxom blog. This is then published statically on my site.
- I subscribe to the blog in Google Reader.
The publishing part of the process enables me to linkify URLs, twitter names, and hashtags, and lets me filter out crap like paper.li announcements and Foursquare checkins. I have links to each individual tweet so I can easily reply or retweet.
You obviously need some building blocks for this to work. Your own server capable of serving files for one. You should also be comfortable with scripting languages.
There’s another solution available if you don’t have access to the above. It’s a service called TweetedTimes. I’ve tried it, and while it does a decent job of keeping track of links posted by your followers it also posts links posted by their followers, which is not always what I want.
Let me know via the comments if you want more information!