Liz's dashboard

srizvi1 replied on August 21, 2008 14:05 to the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Odd, I had passed 200 updates today and thought to myself, "hmm.. maybe I should get rid of some of my dumb updates so I could try to hover within the 200 mark until there's no more worry about old tweets vanishing." Unfortunately though, even after deleting a few old tweets and going down to 197, I still couldn't see my oldest tweets. I found them by using the search.twitter.com page mentioned by MDY within this thread (specifically, this post here: http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...)

wintermute started following the question "Where do Tweets go to die?" in Twitter.

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Congratulations! 8-) – mdy, on August 03, 2008 00:11

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Ta-da! http://tinyurl.com/6lchfj That was TOTALLY worth it. But at least it demonstrates that you _can_ find an arbitrary Tweet. Now I just have to cycle through the remaining 875-million and catalog all my other tweets. – mobilhomme, on August 02, 2008 19:09

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Actually, that's extremely helpful--helps me feel better about the fact that I'm at 560k and STILL going. Also interesting from those numbers is that the Twitter growth trend is very linear--I had expected to see an exponential trend. – mobilhomme, on August 02, 2008 05:29

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Here are a few more status ids and their related dates, for whatever it's worth. Dec 13: 1051963. Dec 28: 1791593. Jan 11: 2642993. Feb 03: 5295743. Feb 20: 5600833. March 2: 5808208. March 11: 6825111. (From what I can tell, sxsw interactive 2007 was from March 7 to 11) – mdy, on August 02, 2008 03:42

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Thanks MDY! I skipped to 400,000 and am now almost to 500,000 and still going. – mobilhomme, on August 02, 2008 00:23

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

mobilhomme, I used the 'whois mobilhomme' command and it tells me that you joined Twitter in December 2006. So I did a search through my favorites and found a tweet that's dated Nov 28, 2006. The status Id of that tweet is 396903. So I think you're quite close to finding your very first one! 8-) – mdy, on August 01, 2008 17:35

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

I'm up to almost 330,000. Still haven't found it. – mobilhomme, on August 01, 2008 17:25

Liz replied on August 01, 2008 16:31 to the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

I didn't know you could go back further than page 10!

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Oh, Eridanus, I thought you worked for Twitter and my URL was to my original query. Here is my Tweet about it: http://tinyurl.com/5pl3qa . – Liz, on August 01, 2008 16:27

mobilhomme replied on July 31, 2008 23:17 to the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

I decided to try a brute-force approach to help answer questions. Knowing that I started Twittering shortly after the service launched (I started at SXSW 2006), I've scripted wget to test every URL, in numbered sequence, starting from

http://twitter.com/mobilhomme/statuses/1

I'll keep going until I find my first Tweet. I'm up to

http://twitter.com/mobilhomme/statuse...

and still haven't found my first Tweet. There are almost 875 million Tweets (if you trust the status numbers), so, worst case scenario is that this take a few years.

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

This is extremely helpful MDY--thanks for posting this info. It's definitely reassuring. I've been Tweeting almost since the service launched, and was worried that all that content had gone away. Although this doesn't answer the question absolutely, it's pretty close. – mobilhomme, on July 31, 2008 23:07

srizvi1 started following the question "Multiple accounts, one user?" in Twitter.

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Ahem... I *meant* the url of your question on Twitter re. the oldest tweet ever found! – Eridanus, on July 31, 2008 18:48

Liz replied on July 31, 2008 18:33 to the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Try this: http://tinyurl.com/5rx4ca for starters.

A comment on the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Great idea :) May we know the url of your question so that we can follow any results? – Eridanus, on July 31, 2008 15:14

Liz replied on July 31, 2008 14:46 to the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

I'm going to post this question on Twitter & sees if anyone has an older tweet!

Eridanus replied on July 31, 2008 13:09 to the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

mdy refers to Jack's Tweet of 01:02 PM March 21, 2006.

I've just discovered Jack's Tweet of 12:50 PM March 21, 2006 (i.e. 12 min older).

Could this possibly be the oldest existing tweet ever, or does anyone know the url of an even older tweet?

I'm fascinated by the history of IT and telecommunications.

mdy replied on July 31, 2008 12:15 to the question "Where did my old Tweets Go?" in Twitter:

Oh yes, I agree completely that being able to navigate old favorites doesn't help people get access to their old tweets. But I hope seeing that link was sufficient to allay any concerns about Twitter deleting tweets that are one year or older. 8-)

In the meantime, I've been relying on http://search.twitter.com and using the "from:username" search parameter to access my tweets from the recent past.

For example, to see tweets from @twitter -- use the from:twitter search parameter.

Unfortunately, tweets that are older than April 2008 are not available in Twitter search since it was only launched in April.