by Jason Snell
Twitter search archive contains every tweet ever
At the All Things D conference in 2011, Twitter’s Dick Costolo suggested that it was unlikely that Twitter would provide access to its enormous archive of tweets. I was disappointed.
Sadly @dickc has no good answer to @joshuatopolsky. Basically Twitter can't find your old tweets, so don't count on the service for that.
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) June 1, 2011
Those are my words, not @dickc's, but still: so sad. Twitter utterly fails as an archival system. We're tweeting on toilet paper, folks.
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) June 1, 2011
Then in late 2012 Twitter allowed users to download their personal Twitter archives, which was a great step forward.
Downloading my Twitter archive! Wheeeeee!
…
I’ve wasted my life.
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) January 17, 2013
And now, as reported by Federico Viticci at MacStories, Twitter has opened up its entire archive.
Right now, old tweets can be found in search by switching to the All tab of the Twitter app, and Twitter supports a basic syntax to filter down tweets for users and dates. I was able to use two different search operators for usernames and dates:
- from:username – load all tweets sent from a user;
- since:2009-04-20 until:2009-04-21 – load tweets from specific days.
Good news! All the tweets are available! Bad news! All your embarrassing old tweets are available!