Twitter is great to get and share information, quickly. But it is all web 2.0 and you cannot use a simple cat or grep to view or search your tweets. I would like to have tweets saved in simple text format: date, user, text. Also, I would like a simple program to give me the list of followers/following of a user.
Fortunately, Twitter provides a web API and people started to implement it in different languages, like Mike Verdone (@sixohsix) and his great Python Twitter Tools.
So here comes twitter-archiver and twitter-follow, python programs added to Python Twitter Tools to archive any public timeline of tweets in simple text format and to view the list of following/followers of a user.