Twitter Backup Service

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Posted on April 30, 2012 by Ed

With the recent suspension of conservative Twitter accounts (seemingly based entirely on mass abuse reports by parties that don’t share the same worldview as those being blocked), an Instapundit reader came up with a great idea:

Business plan! Escrow accounts for your Twitter followers. When your account gets suspended, and they blink, and reinstate you, it auto-adds your followers back..

I’ve been asked to develop this exact solution for someone who fears they might be FABanned (Fake Abuse Banned…pretty weak, but it’s Monday and the coffee hasn’t taken effect yet). If others are interested, I can offer it as an affordable service.

The way it will work (at least in my initial design) is it will use a read-only app to grab an account’s followers and friends and then zip them up in two formats and email them to the user at some interval…probably once a day. There will be a machine readable format and a human readable version. With the machine readable, it would be possible to automatically re-update the friends list using a app with write permissions. I’m not sure if we can add followers back, but it might be possible to automatically tweet them to let them know that they are no longer following you.

If that sounds interesting to you, email me or post a comment on this post.

Ed

UPDATE: I’ve got the service up and running now at Nestwork.net. Site development has been put on hold until I could get the backup functionality in place, so it isn’t a pretty place but the backups work!

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Comments

  • http://reasonpundit.wordpress.com Joe Schueller

    YES. My account @reasonpundit, which is associated with my blog, was suspended in the wave of FABannings. I would totally do this.

  • http://drawandstrike.blogspot.com/ drawandstrike

    I’m interested!

    @drawandstrike

  • Conservotop

    Awesome Tool The Free Market at work

  • IloiloKano

    I have a recommendation regarding how you might charge for such a service. Perhaps you could have two options, one with a flat monthly fee, and an alternative for those of use with fewer followers (less than 1,000). The alternative would be to allow free backups, perhaps less frequently, but you wouldn’t email backups unless the user made a request upon critical need (such as having become a victim). At just such a time, a fee of $1 per hundred followers, with a maximum charge, or perhaps a regressive rate as the number increases, users might be more than willing to pay in order to recover a list of their followers.

  • Shelli aka Houstongracie

    I am interested in Twitter backup service. Please contact me on how to subscribe to this service. Thanking you!!!

  • Jim Forbes

    I am a firm believer in most any back-up-and-restore systems.
    Give it a try.

  • Tom

    Great! I can’t believe they don’t have something like this already!

    Info please!

  • The Political Hat

    I would definitely be interested. Who said innovation was dead.

  • Ron Southwick

    I am interested in a way to do back up of my twitter account. If you have this possibility I would be interested.

  • http://www.TheMadisonProject.org Maggi

    absolutely interested – what is current definition of affordable?

  • Krystyna Fruzynski

    Yes! This is a great idea.

  • http://theothermccain.com smitty

    I’ve had a bit of experience using a Python library against the Twitter API.
    I’d be interested to help out with this effort.

  • http://www.KarenAWyle.net Karen A. Wyle

    I’m interested! (though price will be a factor)

  • Ed

    Hey guys – I’ve been heads down working on this project (and others) and never looked back at my blog. I’ll send all of you an email with more information right away!

    The site is up and running here: http://nestwork.net

  • http://susosttwitter Suzanne Ostrowski

    I am suspended on twitter for posting today on Obamas #3 things about Obama nothing else. No spam no fowl language

  • Ed

    I’m so sorry to hear that Suzanne. I’m trying to get the word out about my nestwork.net backup service because if your account comes back empty, at least we can rebuild it from the backup data.

    Hope it returns from the gulag quickly and without any lost connections!