How to Save the Tweets of the Deceased Before Twitter Cleans Them Up
Twitter has just announced that it plans to free up usernames for inactive accounts . While that means the coveted Twitter handle you’ve been looking at can finally be yours if you happen to grab it before anyone else, Twitter’s move has an unpleasant side effect: if someone you love is no longer there to use the service, their accounts may disappear too.
While the Twitter team is supposedly ” thinking ” of some sort of persistence feature, there have been no claims that they are seriously working on how to preserve such Twitter accounts. Until then, you should assume that your loved ones’ inactive accounts may disappear at some unknown point after December 11th (Twitter doesn’t do a big cleanup right away, but inactive accounts are subject to deletion after that date).
If you want to save tweets to any account, you have two options. The first and most obvious solution is to log into this account. Not only will this uncheck inactive, but you can also use Twitter’s built-in archiving feature to download whatever the person has posted.
If you don’t have access to someone else’s account, there is another, more imperfect method of archiving tweets. Go to All My Tweets , connect the website to your account (that’s okay), and then enter your Twitter user ID. Assuming their tweets are not personal, All My Tweets will create one page from their last 3,200 tweets or so. (This is an API limitation.) Then you can save this website anywhere and you will have a record of this person’s most recent posts.
Does this give you everything a person has tweeted? No. I’m trying to find a great way for the average person to do this without going deep into some crazy coding solution, but for now, All My Tweets is a simple solution worth checking out. While I also suspect Twitter will find a way to allow people to keep important inactive accounts, it doesn’t hurt to save as many tweets as possible just in case .