Last night I started thinking about the content I am creating on Twitter and how I’d like to keep a copy of that data.

My initial thought is to create a plugin that would check my Twitter (JSON – yay!) feed every hour or so and save a copy of new tweets in a new database table. That way I can load the data locally for my site (not rely on Twitter to serve up the data in a widget) and do fun stuff with it. Of course, there are some benefits to letting Twitter serve up the data into a widget, but I like owning my data.

Derek saw the tweet on this and left a comment with a slightly different implementation idea. His implementation would create posts of tweets instead of storing them in a separate table. The benefit is allowing direct commenting on the tweets on your blog. The drawback is that the tweets are now included in all blog content, RSS feeds, etc.¹

Which way would you want this to work, and why? (Note: I’m more interested in your arguments than your final decision). The comments are open.

1. It’s generally easier to add things in than rip them out. [back]

This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.