What that means is something tweeted prior to a week and a half ago can never be retrieved via search.twitter.com. That's bad for users and it's definitely bad for data-mining. Unless Twitter corrects this issue on its own, we have to find another solution for archiving tweets ourselves. Here are 10 ways to do so.

1. The Archivist: A Desktop Tool for Archiving Searches

The Archivist is a Windows desktop software application built by members of Microsoft's Mix Online team. With this program, you can create Twitter searches which will then be archived to your PC so they can be data-mined by you at a later date. Recently, the program was updated so that it can be minimized to the system tray - especially helpful for when you want to track a Twitter search over a long period of time. They also added a data visualization feature which calculates who's tweeting the most about your topic.

2. Twapper Keeper: Archive Tweets Based on Hashtags

Twapper Keeper is an online tool which archives tweets based on a given hashtag. Once you set up a query, Twapper Keeper will periodically scan Twitter for that tag and then archive the tweets it finds on its own servers. Tweets are scanned approximately every 5 minutes but that can vary based on the velocity of the incoming tweets. Once archived, you can then organize the tweets into categories of your choosing which show up on the right-hand side of the archived page.

3. Twitter Tools: Archive Tweets in WordPress

Twitter Tools is a WordPress blog plugin which integrates your blog and Twitter account. Once installed and configured, the plugin can be used to both Twitter links to your blog and to create posts which contain your recent tweets. While this is handy for the WordPress blog owner, keep in mind that post after post of "Today's Tweets" isn't all that appealing to blog readers. You may want to create a separate blog for this if you intend to use WordPress as your own personal Twitter archive.

4. Twistory: Tweets in Your Calendar

Twistory is a service which lets you add your Twitter backlog feed to your favorite calendar application. The service lets you subscribe to any user's Twitter RSS feed which can then be integrated into a calendaring application like Google Calendar, Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other application that supports the iCal format. Tweets are added immediately to the calendar upon posting and the service can even import almost all the way back to your first tweet ever.

5. SweetCron, AmpliFeeder, or Storytlr: A Lifestream of Tweets

We reviewed SweetCron back nearly a year ago when it first launched. Essentially, this self-hosted lifestreaming application lets you create your own customizable version of a FriendFeed-like service, but one that's hosted on your own server. The software is installed on a server with PHP and MySQL running on it and then must be configured with the social media sites you want to aggregate. Of course, one of the sites you can pull in is Twitter.

AmpliFeeder works the same way and includes a number of themes to choose from. This service can also generate XML files which can be used to backup all your social streams' data, too. Recently, Amplifeeder launched their hosted version of the service (get started here), but unfortunately, it relies on FriendFeed to import your lifestream. And who knows how long that will be around.

Storytlr is a third option for creating a lifestream at your own custom URL. However, it's doesn't just function as an aggregator - it also lets you post your own, unique content too. (Our review).

6. Twinbox: Tweets in Your Outlook

TwInbox is an Outlook plugin which lets you receive your friends' updates directly in your Outlook inbox. With this plugin activated, you can search, archive, and group your tweets the same way you manage your email. You can also update your Twitter status from Outlook or retrieve tweets based on keyword searches. Of course, if you're in a corporate environment, your I.T. admin may enforce mailbox size limits which means you'll have to archive your "tweets" folder more often than you'd like to keep your PST/OST to a manageable size.

7. RSS Feeds

One of the simplest ways to archive tweets is to simply grab the RSS feed for your tweet stream of choice and add it to your preferred RSS reader. If you use Google Reader, for example, the service's "infinite scrolling" feature lets you go back to the very first item ever tracked for that subscription. Plus, Reader has a search box at the top for searching for keywords or phrases in your feeds which will also help you rediscover older tweets. (Update! See our post "How to Backup and Search All Your Friends Tweets in Google Reader" for how-to instructions on using RSS as a backup method.)

8. Tweetake, TweetDumpr, Tweetscan, BackupMyTweets, TweetBackup: Twitter Backup Tools

Tweetake is a third-party service which lets you back up your Twitter account including tweets, DMs, followers, friends, and favorites. However, Tweetake is limited to backing up only the first 1000 contacts and there's no way to re-import the data into Twitter at the moment. It's mainly used as a personal archive of data which you can store for safe-keeping. TweetDumpr is a similar service but only focuses on backing up the tweets themselves from public timelines. Tweetscan also lets you download your Twitter message archive including replies to a CSV file. BackupMyTweets and TweetBackup are yet two more Twitter backup services which lets you backup your tweets daily.

9. Archive Tweets with Evernote

The popular note-taking application Evernote offers a feature which lets you send your public Twitter messages and private DMs right into Evernote where they can be searched and stored permanently. Unfortunately, in order for this service to work, you have to put "@myEN" into the body of any public tweet, making it less-than-ideal for archiving your every missive. Instead, this is a good way to archive select tweets you wouldn't want to lose.

10. Geek Tools Let You Archive in XML, PDF, HTML, TXT...or even with Python

RSS guru Dave Winer released a tool earlier this year which archives Twitter posts using the OPML Editor and optionally synchronizes with a structure on Amazon S3. Alternately, there's this simple Python script for archiving tweets. Sourceforge also hosts an app with lets you backup up tweets of different users as XML, HTML, PDF, or TXT. However, it can only perform backups of 3200 tweets at a time. Each subsequent backup will append the additional tweets to the current existing archive.

Why Use ContextMiner?

Marketers will probably be interested in how this free tool is able to track views and links, but that's not really the purpose behind ContextMiner's creation. Instead, the tool is designed more for research than anything else. For example, one of the main reasons to use ConextMiner is its ability to document the cultural phenomena of viral videos.

Often, when a video goes viral, very few people are aware of where it came from, what the story is behind it, who created it and why. As time goes by, finding the original video creator and source is even harder as the video spreads across the internet. But now, thanks to ContextMiner, the history behind a video's creation is no longer a mystery.

Take for instance, Vote Different, the mashup of Hillary Clinton with the famous Apple 1984 Super Bowl ad and one of the most popular videos on YouTube. We've probably all seen this video at one point or another, but did you ever want to know who created it and why?

With ContextMiner, that information can easily be discovered. Because of its ability to pull the inbound links to a video, we can see that the original creator of the video, a user by the name of "ParkRidge47," is the subject of one of the inbound links to the video. A blog post on TechPresident titled "Who is ParkRidge47?" gives us a great history of this particular video's creation. You could also sort through the links provided to find the very first person to link to the video, which is often the creator themselves.

ContextMiner is still under development. In the future, the developers hope to offer tools and policies for exporting the videos, blog pages, and metadata. That's probably not an empty promise - there's already an an option to "download Flash video from YouTube" on the campaign creation form, it's just disabled right now. When that feature becomes available, we think it would be fine to then call ContextMiner a YouTube archiving tool. Since "Archive" implies making a backup copy, until then we think ContextMiner should really just be considered a research tool. Still, we have to say, it's a pretty good one.