Backup Your Twitter, Friendfeed or other RSS Feeds

The furor over Facebook's ill-advised and since-rescinded claim to own all your content made me think whether my Twitter tweets and FriendFeed posts have any sort of value. While their value to anyone except me is questionable, perhaps we can say that they may be of value as an archive, and, that they may gain in value over time, as more and more are built up.

How to Backup FriendFeed, Twitter or other RSS Feeds

Using a similar technique to this previous post, we can use an RSS-to-email service like FeedBurner to essentially backup RSS feeds via email. This will give you a pretty-good backup to IMAP, or, by using email-to-blog services, a post of your posts.

Here's how I plan to do this:

• Create a mail distribution list or "forwarder" in my ISP's dashboard, something like: rick-allbacks@mydomain.com. A DL will forward mail it receives, to list members.
• Make a blog in Blogger or another service that supports email-to-blog. Note its email-to-blog address.
• Create one or two backup IMAP accounts, like rick-backup1@mydomain.com, and add their addresses to the distribution list.
• Add the backup blog's email-to-blog email address to the distribution list.
• Burn a feed in FeedBurner for each RSS URL I want to back up: FriendFeed, Facebook, Twitter and so on. Adjust each republished feed, including publishing the feed via email on the Publicize tab.
• Subscribe my DL email address to the feed. On the Feedburner feed page, there is a link to "subscribe by email" and you can enter the address there.

Finally, note that you'd need to be sure to check the first email you get from Feedburner, as you have to verify the address. I hope this idea helps you backup your FriendFeed, Twitter, and other RSS feeds. Enjoy!