Karsten Januszewski recently sat down and wrote a WPF application that will search the Twitter archives and allow users to save the search results as an XML file or export to Excel.

Karsten writes on MIX Online:

If you have used Twitter search before, you may notice that you can only go back a certain amount of time and/or number of tweets for a given search. In fact, if you read the Twitter search documentation, you’ll note that the folks from Twitter say, "We also restrict the size of the search index by placing a date limit on the updates we allow you to search. This limit is currently around a month but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow."

Thus was born The Archivist, a new experiment from the Mix Online lab that Tim Aidlin and I cooked up recently.   Our motives for writing the app where to solve a problem that, from my research, hasn’t quite been solved before: How do you archive Twitter searches? I looked on the Twitter Apps Wiki but didn’t see anything that accomplished exactly what I was looking for. So, what can you do but write it yourself?

Once Karsten had created the basic framework for the application and got it working, I hooked up to Team Foundation Server and got his latest bits.  From there I fired up Blend 3 and was able to easily style the application and pass it back for deployment.

It also has a timeline view, to show your search over time:

We posted the MIX Online Lab Experiment on the http://Flotzam.com site, which I designed, too.