The use of Twitter to collecting tweets around an event hashtag allowing participants to share and contribute continues to grow and has even become part of mass media events, various TV shows now having and publicising their own tag. This resource is often lost in time, only tiny snippets being captured in blog posts or summaries using tools like Storify, which often loose the richness of individual conversations between participants.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Using a combination of Google Spreadsheets as a data source and a simple web interface to add interactivity it’s possible to let users explorer your entire event hashtag and replay any of conversations.

View example conversation replay

Try out a LIVE version

Update: If you are still struggling to understand the concept Radical Punch have done a overview of this tool

Here's how to archive event hashtags and create an interactive visualization of the conversation (written instructions below):

Twitter: How to archive event hashtags and create an interactive visualization of the conversation

Capturing the tweets

1. Get and setup TAGS

Creating a public interactive visualisation of the archived tweets

1. Copy the url of the spreadsheet you just created
2. Visit http://hawksey.info/tagsexplorer and paste your spreadsheet url in the box, then click 'get sheet names'
3. When it loads the sheet names leave it on the default 'Archive' and click 'go'
4. You now have a visualisation of your spreadsheet archive (click on nodes to delve deeper)
5. To share the visualisation at the top right-click 'link for this' which is a permanent link (as your archive grows and the spreadsheet is republished this visualisation will automatically grow)