Why can't I view all of my updates?

According to Twitter (who responded to a ticket I opened), this is a known bug and they're working on it. Apparently when someone deletes a tweet, it has to cycle out (or something) and you can't use the "older" button until that's happened.

So...Basically we just have to wait. Which I'm fine with, after all, we're not actually paying for this, are we?

Thanks o0_0o.. I haven't had anyone respond to me asking about this all over :) I don't mind waiting at all as long as I know they're going to be back eventually.

Not being able to access my own tweets has seriously shaken my trust and faith in Twitter, far more than the service being occasionally unavailable. Please fix ASAP!

echoing psd's concerns; availability of *my* data is paramount

Just checked using Tweetdumpr (which uses the API to download your entire twitter history) and it's showing my oldest tweet on 19th May 2008. Er, no.

This is pretty poor - if they've deleted all twitter archives past a certain date to save on space or something, they could have at least told us in advance...

I have only 10 pages of archives also. I completely agree with Meg. Users should have been informed if the archives were to be deleted, at least to give us a chance to retrieve them!

Yes. If this is intentional and not some kind of bug, it's really disappointing. Given some notice I would definitely have taken the time to record my 18-month twitter history. A fair bit of it's drivel, but there's also some pretty special stuff in there. Or... there *was*...

If this archive deletion is not temporary, a lot of people are going to be furious about this, especially those of us who've been Twittering for a couple of years and have thousands of Tweets we thought were safely archived. Twitter needs to inform users of this "bug" (if it is one) immediately, and fix it. And if it's not a bug, well, then they should expect more of us to leave - and go to FriendFeed instead.

Echoing the disappointment and surprise that people weren't given the opportunity to at least try and salvage their own archives before they simply disappeared, if that's really what happened.

I understand that there's a lot of heavy twitters and people using this as an rss feed - and I understand that produces a lot of data and a lot of weight for the system. But for some of us, it's a mini-blog or a record of what we've done and where we've been as well as a conversation. And the chance to save some of those records before they just disappeared would have seemed like a nice thing to offer. I know it's a free service, and I appreciate it - but feel let down all the same.

I think the tweets are still there, and you can still see those you happen to have favorited or bookmarked, (such as the ones linked to from here:
http://blog.whatfettle.com/2008/01/05...)

The problem is you just can't find them by paging backwards through your own timeline, or archive them using tools such as Tweetdumpr.

I realise Twitter has had issues with being overloaded, but this action isn't the answer unless they want to alienate passionate, 'twits' like me. http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/2649...

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.

It's a known bug that the Older link is sometimes disabled for no apparent reason. The bug is also noted on the Twitter Status Blog. You can see that the word "Pagination" is highlighted in yellow in the sidebar, and when your mouse hovers over it, the text "Some Users missing Older Link" appears.

Yeah, Tweetdumpr only takes me back to April of this year, rather than late 2006 when I first signed up.

However, my favourites stretch right back to Dec '06 (megp - got one of yours from Feb '07), supporting the bug explanation.

I have a lot of memories tied up in my Twitter data and would be very disappointed to lose them.

I would just like someone to tell us what's going on--this is a big deal and I don't get why it's not in the status blog.

Using Summize to search for my user name & old things I knew I had posted, I was able to bring up older tweets past the ten pages. That's at least reassuring that they are still somewhere but an update or assurance would make us feel better, I think.

http://summize.com/

I feel for you guys. So glad that I'm almost exclusively here: http://identi.ca/exador23 or add /all (remember "with others"?) or /replies

If I have a problem I can @evan who actually uses identica to answer it's version of "What are you doing?" http://identi.ca/evan really explore the difference, it's ok, you can go hundreds of pages back in time.

go ahead check it out. But, please, bring an attitude of patience & tolerance with you. It's a do-ocracy. If you can't fix the issue yourself, realize none of the open source code community is being paid to satisfy you, and your feature request for the laconi.ca source might not be a priority at the moment. But if it's important to enough people & coders, it will eventually come on line.

I don't quite get how pointing out a competitor is underhanded. GetSatisfaction is about helping the users, and if the vendor won't help, alternatives are a useful thing to point out.

Identi.ca could be the best thing to happen to Twitter: it (a) validates them and their pioneering of microblogging and (b) provides pressure for them to improve.

Some old tweets work for me, if I know the direct permalink.

Other old tweets, including starred tweets in my "favourites" appear to have vanished and are completely inaccessible.

I don't care if Twitter has problems, but the radio silence on the problems is what pisses me off the most. I _don't know_ if my old stuff is still there or not. If it's still there, fine, great, we can work from there, I can make backups. If the messed up and stuff have simply vanished, I'll have little faith in using Twitter no matter how much I like it, and will surely begin using another social messaging service.

To work around this issue, I subscribed to my own RSS feed in Google Reader. Unfortunately this now seems to have stopped working sometime on July 16th 2008. Given the feed works directly for me, it's a Twitter to Google Reader issue. Hmm..

Is it really possible that Twitter is letting its users' personal content disappear without keeping us properly updated? Super lame.

And how many people have to respond to this problem before Twitter addresses it either way?

I asked this question on the Google Group and was...underwhelmed by the answer. http://groups.google.com/group/twitte...

It seems even when the new architecture is in place, we might be able to paginate more than 60 days into our own timeline.

The fact that Twitter seems to be ignoring this issue is really starting to piss me off.

And every other site that becomes overwhelmingly popular offers a small fee to users who want to utilize all the features without limits... I am more than willing to pay my livejournal and flickr fees and Twitter has become just as important to me. After reading that Google link (thank you for posting), it seems more dismal than I even thought.

Maybe I really do need to find a permanent alternative at this point. Blah, that's very upsetting... I had a lot archived on Twitter.

I have the same problem too. Any updates past a multiple of 20 aren't viewable. Very annoying.

@dacort very kindly posted a follow-up question at the Pagination topic in the Twitter API group and got a response from Alex.

dacort: Soooo....a followup question. Will our own full archives ever be accessible to us again via the Twitter service?

al3x: Yes, that's absolutely a goal. I consider our service defective unless users can export all of their own content.

I want to read my old tweets!

I'm relatively new to Twitter (I've only been doing it for about 3 weeks), and I can't even see past the first 20 updates. I've noticed that not everyone has the same problem though -- some users seem to be less restricted for some obscure reason. ARG. Please fix it!

As a workaround, I installed Twitter Tools to my WordPress blog and it automatically posts my tweets there... That way, I can have a permanent record of my past updates. Of course, if you don't have a WordPress blog, I don't know what the alternatives are.

Just felt like crying about this again as another user discovers his tweets are long lost in the Twitter ether for the foreseeable future. :-(

via http://twitter.com/rosshill/statuses/...:
"Twitter's new Walled Garden is NOT COOL. Bring back my archives or...."

I'm confused. If we really can't see past our 200 last tweets, it's outrageous! How dare Twitter steal my tweets? Twitter, are you a thief?!

Well I am completely dissatisfied with Twitter's utter silence on this issue. My writing in any form whether is be 140 characters on Twitter's servers is mine.

Not being allowed access to the contributions I have made to build Twitter's business and profile is totally unacceptable. It's a violation of trust not to mention Twitter's own Terms of Service.

Cut and paste from Jules Joyce post:

--Twitter is not living up to their own terms of service, as noted via http://twitter.com/tos, this is very nearly copyright infringement:

"We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours."--

If I don't receive a clear explanation of why this is occurring but more importantly when it will be amended within 10 days of this post then I will take further and much more serious action.

Hi Folks. Every tweet is saved forever and they belong to you. The fact that you can't access them past a certain point right now is an technical challenge that we're working on.

If all goes well, the next engineering update will fix the "Older" button and give you web access as far as 3,200 tweets back. I understand that is still an unacceptable limitation—we will continue to work on it. Additionally, you will be able to go more pages back on your home page timeline.

We're hoping to get these changes out today but it doesn't always go exactly to plan. Thanks for you patience!

@biz Thx much for your update.

Looks like the fix that @biz mentioned has been deployed.

I'm able to go all the way back to page 160 on my Archives pages! Which in the case of my account shows tweets dating all the way back to Jan 2007.

And it seems that I can go back 19 pages now in my Recent tab (used to be 10).

I am in the same situation as Hitsman above, I can go back further than 10 pages now, but on page 11 and beyond I can only see my most recent tweet, so although things seem to be moving in the right direction it doesn't appear to be totally fixed (for me at least) yet.

First, thanks Biz for replying to this and taking this seriously.

Second, I now have access to my full archives, it seems, all the way back to my first tweet on Oct 26th 2007 :-) I do not experience the error others are reporting above.

I can go back beyond page ten now, but I haven't tried to go further than that. Twitter is doing what I want it to now ie. allowing me to keep up with the ebb and flow of my friends' Tweets for the last few days and be part of a little 'community'.

Hmm.. some people in this thread are saying they have full access to their archive. The earliest tweet I can browse is up until August 6, 2008. My first tweet (which I can find via search.twitter.com) is from June 9th, 2008.

It's still broken for me, I can only go back to a few months ago:
http://twitter.com/account/archive?pa...
http://twitter.com/psd?page=43
My faith in Twitter is lost.

It's broken again for me. I can go no further than p. 41 now which equals April 2008.