Confirmed: Twitter is Saving All Your Tweets, After All
Forest fires in California, the plane landing on the Hudson river, the Mumbai hotel attacks - these historical events and many more have been recorded by everyday people on the ground, using Twitter. The historic record may be much, much richer as a result - but you can't access it through search.twitter.com right now.
Many people have worried that the inaccessibility of historical Twitter search results might mean that the messages weren't being saved at all. Company co-founder Biz Stone told us otherwise by email today, though. Twitter is in fact saving all the tweets. You just can't access them through search "right now."
We wrote to Twitter to inquire about the company's stated plans to scrub forthcoming geolocation data from messages after 14 days. That plan is said to be aimed at avoiding subpoenas, though the publishing of the location data at all is opt-in in the first place.
Scrubbed geolocation data after two weeks and no way to access historical information at all? That sounded like a pretty bum deal for a world-changing new communication platform. So we emailed to ask.
This was the reply we received from Biz Stone: "We definitely save all the tweets although you're right in noting that our search focuses more on newer content right now. And yes, the plan is to drop the coordinates after 14 days."
There you go. Now that Twitter is putting $100 million more into the bank, it would be great to see some of those resources dedicated to making information retrieval on the service a first class function. The future would be thankful.
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They save 'all tweets' from a user?
Then why is it the cutoff for my account is at 6500 or something? I can't get access to old tweets when I started a couple of years ago.
If they 'save' them, why can't we access them?
That's good to know that they'll restrict access to location based services.
Also, regarding saving all a user's tweets, they had a blog post about it some time ago, but this was the only thing I could find.
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Things-Every-Developer-Should-Know
Twitter get me amazed again.
"If they 'save' them, why can't we access them?"
I think the restriction is kinda BS considering we've never heard the technical reason why. The technical cost of providing logged in users access to their post-3200 tweets is negligible compared to the other services they provide. If I'm wrong on that, I'd love to hear the explanation from the company.
I think the reason they might be holding back and not be 100% open is to retain the value for themselves and their partners -if- they choose to include that in their monetization strategy. If they decide that it isn't, then they'll just open it up. But, I want access to them, they're my messages and some of them are important.
Saving all the tweets is good and fine, but why deleting the tweets by thousands of numbers?
My friend had 16000 tweets which got slashed to just 400!
I've used loudtweet (or loudtwitter?) to export my tweets to a blog every day. I can still access older tweets since I set it up sometime in December, 2007.
Posted by: motownmutt
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September 25, 2009 1:45 PM
Or you could use a service like http://tweetbackup.com to save your tweets
As just a member of the public, I asked Twitter support on 19 May 2008 as to whether they save all my Tweets or if they were only storing a set number of the most recent ones and then going into the abyss after that.
I got the reply "Yes, your tweets will stay there as long as you don't delete them, or delete your account."
All your tweets are belong to us
I think one of the things about Twitter that appeals to a lot of people is the perception that it is ephemeral and won't come back to haunt you.
I wonder about that, if Twitter is part of your permanent record are you as likely to speak your mind? Could twitter be breaking a contract that many users assumed was there by bringing historical search into play? Could it be that the the regular appearance of the fail whale was one of the things that signaled to people that twitter was a place where you could be safely indiscreet?
I suspect that attempts to monetise historical search of Twitter would leave many users feeling violated. Unless they with a "You own your own past, but anyone else's cost money." sort of model.
I worry about this. I'm amazed that I can still go back to the first email I ever received in Gmail, from June 16, 2004:
http://flic.kr/p/72uEph
Why is that Google can provide me with instant access to over 130K emails, but Twitter bails at 3200? Not impressed.
I want my money back.
Posted by: factoryjoe.com
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September 25, 2009 9:17 PM
I think one of the things about Twitter that appeals to a lot of people is the perception that it is ephemeral and won't come back to haunt you.
I wonder about that, if Twitter is part of your permanent record are you as likely to speak your mind? Could twitter be breaking a contract that many users assumed was there by bringing historical search into play? Could it be that the the regular appearance of the fail whale was one of the things that signaled to people that twitter was a place where you could be safely indiscreet?
I suspect that attempts to monetise historical search of Twitter would leave many users feeling violated. Unless they with a "You own your own past, but anyone else's cost money." sort of model.
This is a great thing. The word is 'accountability.' You'll be more likely to think before you tweet, which will only add value to the experience.
RB
I think twitter is sitting on a goldmine of data and trying to figure out how to best capitalize on it.
@factoryjoe.com because it's a harder problem than you think.
@Kistner - I love your comment ^^ but your comment is the reality that many do not realize it
Saving all tweets? But clearly not all tweets are equal in the eyes of Twitter. My account has been sandboxed for months. "mikecane" does not show up as a tweet originator in Search Twitter. Does Twitter have an answer for that?
I think twitter is sitting on a goldmine of data and trying to figure out how to best capitalize on it.
Measure twice and cut once...that should be your mode of operation on twitter.
The bad may come back to haunt you and its the negativity aspect that is troublesome. Lawyers, Gove Agencies, enemies can capitalize on it..
Its gotta be a pain in the ass dealing with those abnoxious feds all the fucking time...
If it was my company, I'll delete all the tweets after a couple of days a tell the feds to go fuck themselves.
Another app out there which already lets you backup your tweets: Tweetstream. Also pulls out trends (like your TFF) and take your twitter data with you.
(@Chetan Bhawani we've had some success uncovering lost tweets with Tweetstream. Give it a try.)
Social networks like facebook are gathering too much information on people allowing
projects like the gaydar project (http://gawker.com/5364264/face.....it-project) work or
websites like http://www.myfacebookstalker.com to get results.
Thsi is really sad, to invest such resources in this what is the point of it all? surely important feature would be to enhance the functionality oh well have retweeted this!!