To Turn Back the Tweets of Time
June 19, 2012
You just can’t turn back the tweets of time, at least not too far back. They’ve been going for the top spot in spontaneous micro blogging, but to the dismay of its 140 million users Twitter has issues. For a social site that was designed for speed updates, it works. Your nightmare begins if you dare try to look into the past beyond a few days according; Topsy knows what you did on Twitter last year.
Ironically, Topsy Labs has a database of tweets including links going back to 2008, however Twitter does not provide this service and:
“Why doesn’t Twitter, which has all this data in the first place, already offer its own archive search? The San Francisco-based company’s answer each time people have asked, including my most recent query on Wednesday, has been “we’re working on it.”
“I would suggest that before it embarks on yet another site redesign, it tackle this issue. We’re not far from it being impossible to write a memoir or biography of the average public figure without looking over what they tweeted.”
Twitter currently has over 400 million tweets hitting the internet daily. They are donating their database to the Library of Congress in the name of scientific research. Perhaps they can work out the problems that Twitter’s countless updates could not. For now there will be no turning back the tweets of time on Twitter itself, but Topsy has them.
Jennifer Shockley, June 19, 2012
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