Do you ever come across tweets that are so well stated, and that resonate so well with you, that you want to see them again (and again) in the future? Well, it’s easy enough to do with the right app.
I use the Readwise app to store memorable tweets, as well as highlights from my kindle, and snippets from articles I find all over the internet. Readwise sends me a daily email, containing a handful of these highlights, so I can re-experience these ideas, driving the points home, and possibly inspiring me to take action on some front.
Of course, you need an account on Readwise, which you can set up in less than a minute, following these instructions.
Once your Readwise account is active, you’ll need to connect your Twitter account to your Readwise account – a snap – all you do is visit this page, enter your Twitter handle, hit submit, and you’re done. (You have to be logged into Twitter on the device you’re using, of course.) Now, whenever you see a tweet or thread that you want to remember, you can instantly save it to your Readwise account, and it’ll automatically appear in your Readwise app, and in your daily Readwise email.
Once connected, there are two ways you can save an individual tweet to Readwise. The simplest is to just reply to the tweet, with message, “@readwiseio save” (without the quotes).
Here’s your Readwise dashboard, with the new Tweets section:
And, your Tweets page, updated seconds later, with the saved tweet:
If you don’t want your reply to show up in the Twitter feed, you can use DM instead – just DM the tweet to @readwiseio. If you DM the tweet, any (optional) text you include in the message will be treated as a note in Readwise. If you don’t want to attach a note, just leave the text area blank.
Here’s an example, without the text message.
Saving a Tweet Thread (Tweetstorm)
You can save entire threads (tweetstorms) as well. To save a thread, just reply (on any tweet in the thread) with the message, “@readwiseio save thread” (without the quotes). As with saving individual threads, you can DM a thread as well – just DM any tweet in the thread to @readwiseio with the word “thread” or “t” in the message.
Note that saving a thread will result in one entry in your Readwise Tweets section, containing a set of individual “highlights” – in other words, each of the original tweets in the thread is treated as an individual highlight in your daily email, and in the Readwise app. In the example below, (1) shows a thread, consisting of 7 individual tweets, each of which will show up individually in the app and in the daily email. (2) shows all tweets from a given Twitter account; in this case, we’ve saved two individual tweets from Edward Norton’s account. Each of those tweets stands alone, of course, and is treated like any other “highlight” in the daily email and Readwise app.
Keeping a Tweet Thread (Tweetstorm) In Context
You may want to keep the individual tweets in a thread together, since they have context together, and maybe don’t have context alone. To keep all the tweets in a thread together as a single “highlight”, you can unroll the thread, then save the unrolled thread to Readwise. Here’s how you do that:
Unroll the thread: on any tweet that is part of the thread, click on the reply button and enter @threadreaderapp unroll. (Note: although they specify that you can reply to any tweet in the thread, sometimes that fails, in which case you should reply to the first tweet in the thread.)
Wait for the Twitter notification from the threadreaderapp that the unroll has been completed.
Click on the ThreadReaderApp notification, then click on the embedded link in the notification (1), or on the text of the tweet itself (2), which will take you to the ThreadReader app.
In the Threadreader app window, select all the text in the thread, as you would normally do any text, then right click on the selection , and choose Save Highlight to Readwise in the pop-up menu. (You’ll need to have the Readwise Chrome extension installed – which is part of the account setup process anyway – and activated.)
Note that, when using the “Save Highlight to Readwise” function, the thread will show up in your Readwise account as an Article, not as a tweet, since it was saved from a web page (all web page snippets are saved in your Readwise Articles section).
Managing Tweets in Readwise
Tweets are intermixed with highlights from all your other sources in your daily Readwise email, as well as being surfaced in the Readwise app. You can manage tweets just like you do any other highlights, within the Readwise app – Favorite them, discard them, change the resurfacing frequency, etc. You’ll find them in the new Tweets section of your Dashboard.
So, whenever you see a tweet that you want to see again, just save it to Readwise, and it’ll show up soon in your daily Readwise email just like that!