A Tool for Archiving Your Facebook Content, Twitter Too!
The archiving of social media content is an interesting and important topic that requires a dialogue between social net providers, the archive and library communities, and if possible, users. If social media continues becoming the primary way we communicate with each, who will be collecting and permanently saving this record? Does it need to be saved in the first place. Will/Should every user be responsible for their own material on their own computer or should these archives be in the cloud? Or, will it just be ephemeral and gone in a few days after posting?
This topic is briefly touched on in this post by Susan Thomas from the futureARCh blog. The focus is Facebook and she reports that there is possibly some automated "friend" who will archive your content. She never heard of this service and neither have we.
Have you?
Thomas does introduce us to an experimental Firefox add-on that will archive some of your Facebook content on your computer.
ArchiveFacebook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save web pages from Facebook and easily manage them. Save content from Facebook directly to your hard drive and view them exactly the same way you currently view them on Facebook.
Why would you want to do this? Facebook has become a very important part of our lives. Information about our friends, family, business contacts and acquaintances is stored in Facebook with no easy way to get it out. ArchiveFacebook allows you to do just that. What guarantee do you have that Facebook won't accidentally, or in some cases intentionally delete your account? Don't trust your data to one web site alone. Take matters into your own hands and preserve this information. Show it to your kids one day!
Currently ArchiveFacebook can save your:
+ Photos
+ Messages
+ Activity Stream
+ Friends List
+ Notes
+ Events
+ Groups
+ Info
In terms of archiving Twitter, we have read about several tools and used one of them. In this RWW article by Sarah Perez from last Summer, she lists several options. From software named The Archivist (Windows Only) to Tweetake, TweetDumpr, Tweetscan, BackupMyTweets, TweetBackup this article offers many options.
Finally, another service mentioned is one we've used. It's named Twapper Keeper, it's free, and it's still online.
Twapper Keeper archives (on their severs) tweets based on hashtags. It's very easy to use and the learning curve is just about zero. Here's what a Twapper Keeper archive looks like. This one is from SLA 2009 in DC.
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