Where did my old Tweets Go?

An alternative (though I realize this may not be exactly what you're looking for) is TweetDumpr.

It's a service put up by @bck that puts all your tweets in a csv file that you can then download and save offline on your own machine.

See http://www.bradkellett.com/tweetdumpr/

I used it a month or two ago and it was able to get all my tweets dating back to September 2006.

i tried to get this data with the api as well and couldn't -

tried both:
http://twitter.com/account/archive.xm...

and

http://twitter.com/account/archive.xm...

and still am only getting the last 20 (not 80) entries.

Hi ahmedre. There's an ongoing discussion at the Twitter Development Google Group about the archive method returning only 20 instead of 80 tweets.

You might be better off following that thread, since API related discussions take place in that group, rather than in the GSFN forum.

Thanks to everyone so far for the helpful and informative responses, but it sure would be nice if someone from Twitter would address this question officially.

It's vexing to be left wondering whether my history of Tweets (not to mention everyone ELSE's) have fallen into a black hole.

All I really want to know is whether my old Tweets will ever return, or if they are lost forever.

I highly doubt Twitter will keep this limitation forever. They just like to limit features as other features are struggling. But they haven't gone into a 'black hole', because if you have any of your old tweet URLs, those still work.

oddly enough mobile twitter has almost all my old tweets. Try going to m.twitter.com. Would be great if Twitter would address this issue.

This is one of those things I feel that Twitter could just let us know what is going on... Will we get them back or not?

I twittered through some pretty serious times in my life and was excited to eventually look back and be reminded of great stuff.

Its like losing a bunch of personal photos... If Flickr were to up and just remove peoples photos there would be a serious uproar...

Am I the only one who sees this as a serious betrayal? I don't mind that twitter goes down sometimes just make sure my data is secure...

Fwiw, I don't think anything has been deleted.

I say this because my oldest tweet is still viewable in the system, and it dates back to September 2006. I keep the URL bookmarked so I can check whether or not Twitter has started deleting older tweets.

Given that a tweet this old is still there, I think it's safe to expect that anything tweeted since Sep 2006 is still there and accessible as individual tweets, provided you know the exact URL. It seems (based on this) that it's the 'browsing' of the archive pages that's currently buggy.

I don't know the URLs for old Tweets. But if I go to Friend Feed, I can see older Tweets. I'd rather be able to access them on Twitter though.

This bothers me, too. In my case, I can only go back three pages. Since my old tweets seem to disappear about a year after they were written, I figure that Twitter will only let you page through tweets less than a year old. All of my old tweets are presumably still around, but offhand I don't know how to get to more than a couple of them. Seems like that's what the "Older" link is for.

I think what is most frustrating is that this question (and one I wrote that is on the same topic) is almost 30 days old without any comment from those responsible for running the system.

Helloooo? Is anyone listening???

i second liz's frustrations.

i've relatively new to twitter, but my first two days of "tweets" are no longer accessible to me (ie. i can't go back from the main page to access any archives.)

this, combined with the fact that i sent a help request e-mail to twitter that i couldn't get my cellphone to register with system several weeks ago and never got a response, makes me question if i really want to continue using this service.

again, to quote liz:

helloooo?

is anyone listening???

Hello. In the Twitter Development Google Group (which is the discussion group for API and third-party developers), there is an ongoing discussion about the pagination limits.

I'll paste the relevant tidbits below.

Al3x of Twitter said:

Until we can reliably serve timelines without a bunch of cache trickery, we're forced to only allow pagination as far back as cache can sustain.

When our new architecture is in place it should be possible to paginate back 60 days for friends_timeline, and possibly more for user_timeline.

@dacort replied:

Soooo....a followup question.

Will our own full archives ever be accessible to us again via the Twitter service?

Al3x answers:

Yes, that's absolutely a goal. I consider our service defective unless users can export all of their own content.

I believe the above conversation can be taken as a clear statement of direction and intent on Twitter's part.

No timelines yet, though, as they are still focused on stabilizing the service.

I'm still confused. Your answer concerns when our old Tweets might be available to the user but my question is are they archived? MDY says she can access her first Tweets but I was told by someone else that Tweets are deleted after a year.

Which is the case? Are they kept on your servers indefinitely or deleted after a certain period of time?

Hi Liz. I can't speak for your account specifically, but my first tweet is dated September 2006, and you can see for yourself that it's still on Twitter's website --> click here to see.

It's almost 2 years old now, and it hasn't been deleted or moved to offline storage.

Oh, and here's another link that should help demonstrate that old tweets are still available online and just not navigable right now.

Here's the link to the oldest page of favorites in @jack's account:
http://twitter.com/jack/favourites?pa...

You'll see on that link that his oldest favorite'd tweet is still viewable on the Twitter website, and is dated March 2006.

If they were deleting the really old tweets, then the ones listed on the page above should no longer be viewable online.

If you've favorite'd some of your own really early tweets then you should be able to navigate through your favorites and confirm that they're still available.

I'm glad you can get to your old favorites. But this doesn't help the average user get back into their archives. BTW, I had no idea Twitter is two+ years old! I thought it was born in early 2007.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

we were referred here from the latest post over here: http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/to...?

After reading this thread, I feel a little better about Twitter. I was worried old posts would be deleted but if they are still out there and we are waiting on a better way to access them, then I'm not so worried.

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...)

Your personal tweet archive now goes back 3,200 tweets. More info here. :)

So the next question is, will hashtag tweets still be available? It seems sad that we're going to lose the public and personal record of collaboration and memes that have occurred - from the sublime (#iranelection) to the ridiculous (#yomamma)...

Seems there's some social history right there that coudl do with some lovin'