Just today I ran across a reference to ThinkUp and on whim I installed it on my hosting account. This is a way for you to keep your own local cache of Twitter, Facebook and Google+ (so far.) It is open source and with luck will continue to have features added for some time. I have been using Twitter for nothing but the auto-posts from this blog for some time now. It’s possible that having ThinkUp available will make me willing to use Twitter again. Also possible that it doesn’t. It does solve one of the very annoying parts of Twitter, that you post things and eventually they plop out the memory hole and into the crapper.
My first thought was that ThinkUp really needs a generic RSS plugin as well as plugins for some of the big services. My second thought was that all it really needs is a plugin to read FriendFeed and then all of the rest of it is taken care of. if I contribute any code, that might be the code I’m willing to do.
My ThinkUp instance is here. I’ve made the Twitter and G+ streams public, and for G+ and Facebook only posts that are made fully public get imported. I have to remember while using G+ that anything I want to prevent bubbling into the open internet needs to be more restricted than Public. It remains to be seen how useful this wil be, but it looks promising for now. I had thought of doing something similar with the Drupal Activity Stream module except that it looks abandoned now and has no Drupal 7 version available. I’ll see how this works for me and report back later.
Update: As a bonus, I’ll put the embed code for my most recent post here. I honestly have no idea what it is going to do. We can learn together.
