UPDATE: Twitter announced that you can now request a zip file of all your tweets.
Kellan Elliott-McCrea, the CTO of Etsy, has made available an searchable archive of Twitter’s first year of tweets. It’s a fascinating dip into the early days of the service.
The first two tweets from Biz and Ev testing out their new service, twttr is a 21st century version of the Mr. Watson. Come here, I need you! Check out the timestamps.
Followed 11 minutes later by:
If you were on twttr or as it later became known, twitter in 2006, you can search for your first tweets at http://kellan.io/oldtweets. Kellan writes more about what he built on his blog where he writes,
I think our history is what makes us human, and the push to ephemerality and disposability “as a feature” is misguided. And a key piece of our personal histories is becoming “the story we want to remember”, aka what we’ve shared. I just wanted my old tweets, as a side effect I got all of them.
It’s humbling to look at these early tweets. Like the first, tentative steps of a child. This was before hashtags, before the @sign, before links, it was just text and, if memory serves, most of us were using T9 text entry and sending our blips off via SMS to 40404. We had no idea what twitter would become.
Thank you @kellan for digging up our collective past and reminding us of our earlier, simple selves. It’s amazing how something so mundane has turned into a force that has sparked revolutions and changed the media landscape.
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