kosertech

The last day or so twitter has had some following/follower contacts issues where people lost contacts. They are working to restore them but for those that wish you can make a backup of your contacts for reference periodically just to have a record of it in the case of disaster.

This method will work for those who are following less than 100 people. Make a call to the twitter API like this.

http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml

If your following more than 100 people you will need to add the page parameter which will return the next 100 you are following, append the parameter page=2 for instance
http://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml?page=2
for the next 100, keep adding 1 to the page until you capture all your followers then merge the data in excel or some other tool.

What will be returned will be an xml file of the people you are following. You can save this file then import it into excel or some other tool for archival. In excel choose file-> open and select the xml file you saved from above. Select read only workbook and it will give you a nice spreadsheet format of the data that you can save to a regular excel file. This should work in open office but I don’t have it installed to check.

To archive the people following you use the same method but the following url
http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml
You can apply the same logic as the above page=2 to capture followers beyond the first 100 such as

http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?page=2

Happy twittering