140Char

There is one feature I dearly wish Twitter would implement as soon as possible. Although I understand they need a business model, and my day job will hopefully be made slightly easier with their proposed marketing/business tools, there is one thing which is becoming ever more vital to me as a user.

Let me search and organise my Direct Messages easily, please. Tweetdeck does.

(I’m trying to check through some of the other popular clients, such as Seesmic Desktop)

For me, Twitter is easily my most used social network – I do use the messaging functionality in Facebook and Linkedin, for example, but Twitter is the stream of contacts and information that I follow and interact with constantly.

And as my network has grown, and Twitter has increase in popularity, an ever-increasing amount of business and personal messages are flowing in and out of my accounts.

It’s starting to replace email as my primary form of conversation with many people.

And yet I have over 200+ Direct Messages, and more coming in every day. And despite my best efforts to sort and file the information, there’s so much getting lost in a list that I can’t order, filter or search.

And although I’m a fan of Tweetdeck, there are times when I can’t install Adobe Air, or I need to use the web interface for other reasons.

Cheers.

A User.

Backing-up your stuff is never a back idea, although there’s some debate over whether to choose the cloud or a local harddrive. But if the cloud’s your choice, then there’s a new company to add with BackupMy.Net.

You get to save emails, blogs, pictures, and most importantly here, Twitter.  It’s relatively fast, and you can download your tweets in HTML, JSON or XML format.

If you want to ask them a question directly, obviously they’re on Twitter as @backupmymail (not backupmytwitter?)

It’s free to back up your Tweets, no password is required, and their own counter is claiming close to 3 million Tweets are already protected.

The main concern that has been highlighted so far has been ReadWriteWeb pointing out that it auto-Tweets on your behalf.

As fast as we’re twittering, new applications are appearing! Just last week I suggested to a friend we should work on a system for backing up Twitter information – this week there’s already a choice of two applications.

Tweetake will back up your Friends, Followers, Favourites, Your Tweets, or Everything from your Twitter account. It does warn that you’ll need to exit certain Twitter clients, like Tweetdeck. Within a minute or two, I had an Excel file with 19 days of my last Tweets, and a list of people with their name, id (number in which they joined Twitter), description, location, last status update, avatar location on Twitter’s servers, and whether their updates were protected. The only thing I couldn’t find was an indication of which ones were followers, and which ones were friends. So you really need to export your friends as a separate list.

It’s a nice quick system, but it relies on you regularly backing up your lists. One benefit is you can see how many people are on Twitter within your friends list – mine started with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone at 12 and 13, and went up to the highest number at 15,160,529, although there were about 20 people with strange id numbers.

Twittersafe, like Tweetake, requires you to sign in with your Twitter username and password. It takes a while to log in, and you’re presented with a red ‘Back Up’ button and a couple of sponsorship adverts. Click to Back Up and everything goes quiet for a while. There’s a blank bar, which I presume should be a status bar. And that seems to be about it.

There claims to be an option to download an Excel copy, and future features will possibly include one-click restoration of your followers, which might be handy. But unless someone else has more success, it’ll have to be Tweetake and manually re-adding people!