[Twitter] "I feel like someone just burned my diary"

A simple GET request to Twitter API reveals basic information about your Twitter account.

http://twitter.com/users/show.json?screen_name=highwind

And looking at the value of created_at will quickly tell you when your twitter account was created. As for me it was "Thu Jun 14 13:38:12 +0000 2007". Assuming that I was in Washington D.C. area, it was Thursday morning. And according to my old blog, apparently I wasn't doing much.

Out of curiosity I wanted to know what my first tweet was almost 4 years ago. So I head over to twitter.com. On my twitter profile page, only way for me to get to my oldest tweet was to just scroll scroll scroll... This got ridiculous real quick. Thinking that Twitter API should solve the problem but too lazy to read the documentation, I googled to see if anyone created a tool to find my oldest tweet^[1].

First tool I came across was called Tweet Scan Backup. The service scans your tweets using Twitter API and creates a zip file of a csv file that contains all of your tweet. The service worked as it was advertised and gave me a link to download the zip file. The oldest tweet it found was from November of 2007. It was missing 5 months worth of my tweets!

Upon further googling, I found many reports saying that you can only retreive up to 3200 tweets. Anything older than 3200 was just not retrievable in any way. People were screaming their blogs off about atrocity of Twitter for not releasing their old tweets. Some people went as far as saying "I feel like someone just burned my diary". I was midly upset but not mad enough to blog about it... oh wait...

Although there seem to be reports of Twitter claiming that the old tweets are some where safe in their hidden bunkers^[2], it is somewhat disturbing that one can't get to it easily. Recent Google Facebook debacle of open data on top of the Wikileaks controversy really makes you think about cloud storage. As a heavy user of cloud services, and a developer who creates web serivces that captures user data, this is an issue that cannot go ignored.

As a user, I doubled checked to see if I have a local backup of all my cloud data (which I do now, including tweets). As a developer, I must take extra caution in storing user data. I guess I shouldn't close down dickensurl.com. :P

[1] As my tweet from yesterday states, there was a tool already made.