Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
zachholman.com
Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
1–10 of 77 posts
Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
#2Didn't someone recently create a way to go back and see your first tweet?
Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
#3It really is a shame they haven't provided any mechanism, even if it were less convenient than the standard API interface.
I've seen a lot of talk from Twitter that "you can trust us", "we still have all of your tweets", but it really doesn't help much if there isn't any way to get at them. Has there been any discussion from Twitter that this is even on their radar as a near-term priority?
I was sort of surprised that the Library of Congress work did not include some sort of web.archive equivalent that allowed anyone access to the entire database — Twitter has shown a willingness to let other people solve hard problems it didn't want to, including when it pointed developers to a 3rd-party firehose for a while.
Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
#4Didn't someone recently create a way to go back and see your first tweet?
Yes, but those types of services only work if you have less than 3,200 statuses, or, depending on the service, if your first tweet was published while their service was active and collecting your tweets (which isn't likely if your account is old).
Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
#5I completely agree. I saved the link to a tweet from Biz Stone about an app i launched 2 years ago (twootball), but now it's gone.
Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
#6Well, I think you just found a way for Twitter to make some money. Remove the theoretical access and Web limit for accounts or increase limit to impossibly high number.
It is much akin to NYT charging for access to old articles.
They may have to store more tweets in the current database or charge a retrieval fee to obtain it from the archive. They could give it away for free too...
Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
#7I value my past tweets too but twitter is having a hard enough time keeping the service up as it is. Id rather they focus on making the api more reliable before working on giving access to older data.
Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
#8This is precisely why I built http://tweetsaver.com ... I wanted a nice way to search through ALL my old tweets AND keep them around. I'm always retweeting awesome content, favoriting interesting things, and sometimes I just want to remember what I said without having to click MORE MORE MORE MORE for 100 pages to find it on twitter.com. Maybe someday Twitter will turn on a feature that kills my app, but for now I think it's the best way to archive, organize and search the great content that flows on twitter.
Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
#9They could simply slap a 'last visited' flag on ever tweet and discard those that had not been looked at after a year or two. You always have the option of backing up your own data, how much storage is it going to take to periodically scrape you tweet history in to a text file?
Re: Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
#10I've heard (second-hand) that Twitter isn't discarding users' tweets after they hit 3,200, they just don't provide API access to them. They're still sitting in a DB somewhere, just inaccessible currently, until Twitter provides access to them.