I’ve seen enough company failures and changes in terms of service to always like a backup plan for when a service goes missing (plus working on system migrations tends to make you think the worse of data).

As a pretty heavy user of Twitter, I’ve been thinking more about what happens if the service goes bad, or if they simply never fix their broken search function.

To help with both, I’ve written a fairly hacky pair of node.js scripts which collect any mentions of you, and any tweets you send, using the Twitter Search API, and uploaded it to github.

The 2 files are pta_server.js and pta.js.

pta_server.js is meant to be run in the background using something like forever, and connects to Twitter Search, gathers any new tweets, and stores them in a MongoDB data store.

pta.js is a very basic web interface, which connects to the MongoDB data store and retrieves all collected tweets, ordered by date.

Hopefully it’ll come in useful, and I plan on improving both the functionality and the documentation soon. If you want to give it a try, check it out and let me know what you think.