One thing that has been bothering me with social services is the difficulty of creating a backup. What would happen if Twitter suddenly dissapeared, or even worse, what would you do without your Delicious bookmarks? It has happened a few times before, services like Geocities and Stick-it were closed almost over night (I’m exagerating, but if you are on holidays in the wrong period, you might come back to see your data gone)
Backups of your local system are important, but so are backups of remote systems. Although people tend to thrust third parties a lot more, most of them don’t offer any kind of data guarantee. Certainly if you’re not paying for the service, there’s very little you can do if your data is gone.
Twitter is certainly a bad offender for me. Although I haven’t been tweeting that much lately, I do try to share interesting insights and valueable sites, so I don’t want to see those go. So when I saw “Tweet Tweet”, a WordPress plugin to backup your tweets, I was immediately charmed. I noticed it hasn’t been updates in a while, but I think it is the only plugin that actually stores a backup copy of your Tweets.
As an added extra, you can integrate the tweets in your blog. Which I’ll probably do at some point, when I get around to updating the layout.
Have fun and don’t forget to backup.