Watermark export using Dropbox

I’ve been making Watermark better. Sometimes it’s small tweaks or bug fixes; other times, more noticeable new features. Because it’s a subscription, I’m determined to improve it quickly and often. I don’t write about most of these changes, but the new Dropbox sync in Watermark deserves special attention.

Watermark originally shipped without any kind of export feature. This was a glaring omission for an archiving tool. But because of the large number of tweets stored by Watermark — some users have hundreds of thousands of tweets from their friends in the app — a simple export wasn’t feasible. I could have offered an export of just your own tweets, but then you also have the fairly clunky step of waiting for the server to gather tweets together, then downloading a file from your web browser, finding where to store it or the previous downloaded copy to replace it with.

Dropbox sync fixes that. Watermark can now automatically copy tweets (and App.net posts) from your saved filters and custom collections to CSV files on Dropbox. For example, search Watermark for “iPhone 5”, click “Save as filter”, and the most recent 1000 tweets matching that query will appear in a file called “iPhone_5.csv” on Dropbox. It keeps running in the background, so the files are updated every hour as new tweets matching the search are downloaded by Watermark, even if you aren’t signed in.

See the account page and FAQ for details and a sign-in link to authorize Watermark with Dropbox.

Manton Reece @manton