Twitter: give me my tweets!

July 12, 2008 / Filed under: Twitter, API, Rants

This is absurd. Here's what a I want, and what Twitter will not allow:

Every day, I want to see the tweets I posted exactly a year ago, this date. From what I can tell, there is no way to specify a date in an API request. There are two methods that appear to do this: "since" and "since_id" - but neither of them work properly, nor make much sense. I don't want to see tweets since a certain date, I want to see tweets created on a certain date. This should be a simple parameter, something like:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?post_date=2007-07-12

Nope, that would be too easy.

There is no way to access tweets other than your most recent 200. (Or whatever Twitter is currently allowing - 200 is generous lately...)

What good does that do? I have almost two years worth of daily content posted to Twitter, and I can only see my most recent 200, which would probably equal the past two weeks for me.

I try other tools like Summize and Tweetdumpr, and they too are limited to how many tweets they can pull.

This is just not cool, and really limits things from a conceptual point of view. Twitter is just an entity, but my tweets are my tweets. I should be able to get them all whenever I want, and not be given an excuse that Twitter's servers can't handle it. That's not my problem. Give me my tweets.

I would be willing to pay for the service if they just fixed the damn thing.

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