Save Twitter Search results forever with Tweetdoc

Twitter Search is a powerful way of measuring public opinion but it’s currently crippled because you can’t look very far back. At present you can view tweets no older than ten days. Wouldn’t it be good if you could easily save search results to come back to at a later date?

Tweetdoc aims to solve that problem in a beautifully simple way – saving Twitter Search results as a PDF.

Who is this useful for? Imagine you run an event that uses a hashtag – you could keep a permanent record of the what people were saying on Twitter about the event by saving all mentions of your hashtag with Tweetdoc. Businesses could run a daily Twitter search for their brand name using Tweetdoc and use it in marketing reports.

Tweetdoc’s PDFs are well presented, with a title page displaying a user-related description of the search along with the avatars of every Twitter user included in the search. Although the default setting makes your PDF publicly available on the Tweetdoc site, you can set up a user account and set your documents to be private – something I imagine most users will want to do.

The main problem  is that PDF generation is currently slow. I mean really slow. You could be waiting the best part of half an hour to receive your finished document. Even when the report is complete, the ‘Processing’ notification continues to display. Refresh the page, though, and you’ll find your finished report.

For a service still in the early stages of its development this can be excused, but it needs improving as many people will just assume the service is broken. In today’s realtime web your rarely have to wait for anything. Maybe a progress bar would help here.

Although originally designed for event organisers, Tweetdoc is beginning to take steps to address the needs of business users. The service’s developer Martin Rue has just added one-click integration with Edocr, a Youtube-style service that allows easy hosting and sharing of documents. This is the first use of Edocr’s new OAuth-based API.

Ideas for the future include charging for premium features like automated daily reports. If Tweetdoc continues to hone its service we could be looking at a highly useful tool here.