BackupMyTweets Announces Plans To Shut Down By End Of January

BackupMyTweets does a little of what we do here at SocialSafe, providing its users with a searchable archive of their tweets. While BackupMyTweets stores its users’ data in the cloud, we opted to give our users total possession of their own data, so SocialSafe stores all of a user’s content on their own PC or Mac. Today we saw a tweet from them letting their users know that BackupMyTweets is shutting down at the end of January.

As you are probably aware, Twitter is in the process of giving users the ability to download all their tweets to a searchable archive, and given that this is what BackupMyTweets does, they’ve made the decision not to compete with Twitter. They explained the decision this morning on (where else?) Twitter:

We will be shutting down BackupMyTweets on January 31 because Twitter has added a new "Download Tweets" option under Settings.

— BackupMyTweets.com (@backupmytweets) January 8, 2013

After seeing the tweet, we also read the responses from many the people who had grown accustomed to using BackupMyTweets, saying that they will miss using the service, especially the automated daily backups. It was those user reactions that inspired this blog entry. We thought it appropriate to let our existing users know that we have absolutely no plans to slow down or stop what we do as a result of Twitter offering a partially comparable service.

So why are we soldiering on defiantly despite the appearance on the horizon of an ‘official’ equivalent to our service? Firstly, Twitter is just one of several social networks that SocialSafe supports, so there’d be no point in throwing the baby out with the bath water. Secondly – and perhaps more importantly – SocialSafe doesn’t just download your tweets. Users can download their mentions, DMs, favourites, followers and following, as well as their own updates. We go further still by aggregating multiple social accounts, allowing users to choose which aspects of their various online social histories to download, store, browse and search.

So to recap, we completely understand why BackupMyTweets have called it a day, and we wish all their staff the best of luck in their future endeavours. We’d also like to reassure our own users that SocialSafe will continue to provide the same services usual, and to extend a warm invitation to all you BackupMyTweets refugees who’d like to try using SocialSafe to back up your tweets for free – we look forward to you coming aboard. It’s also worth reiterating that all of your data is stored on your own machine, so no matter what happens to the original copies, you can have peace of mind knowing that your digital memories are safe to be viewed whenever you want.