Back Up Your Twitter Account
If your tweets are more than just ephemeral toots of the moment, you want a backup copy of them on your computer. Twitter only makes up to 3,200 tweets available for download on a given account, so if you're approaching that number there's even more reason to start saving your stuff—because it won't be available from the Twitter web site proper.
Command line lovers can use this clever method to download their tweet XML via cURL. Alternately, web application Backup My Tweets does just that and lets you download your tweets in HTML, PDF, or JSON format, with a gotcha: you have to tweet about Backup My Tweets in order to use the free trial. We posted about tweet backup solution Tweetake, which outputs your tweets in a CSV file, but be warned: Tweetake requires you enter your Twitter username and password on their site, which isn't the most secure option the Twitter API offers. (Don't enter your Twitter password anywhere other than Twitter.com itself; if you do to use a Twitter-related service, change it immediately afterward.) For more Twitter archiving options, check out the social media experts' picks over at ReadWriteWeb.
What do people think about "Don't enter your Twitter password..." etc? A lot of applications/non-Twitter clients require it to work - what's the option?
