Twitter also doesn't give a fuck about archival via screenshots. I'm pretty hard-pressed to imagine who would, actually.
What does this mean? Is this picture older or newer than the other picture, also labeled "More than one year ago"?
Personally when I've done it I often also simply always have the absolute time: "Wednesday, August 22nd at 8:22PM (a day ago)", with the order of the two elements chosen depending on which makes more sense.
What is that, like two years ago, oh maybe just over 2 years, oh shit no just under...
We have a standardized date system. It's been in use around the globe for years. It works. Please use it.
"783 days and 4 hours ago" really is worse. If I am browsing a photo and look at that, my first reaction is "That photo was taken a long time ago". If my buddy asks when that happened, I'll have to start doing some simple math in my head. "Uhh, around two years ago? So what, that's 2010?"
Simply putting the date would have been a much friendly solution. You know immediately that it was "a long time ago" because everyone knows what the current year is. And you know what year immediately.
Conversely, on short scales it's opposite. I don't really care if a post was on Monday or Tuesday (usually). I care that it was recent. Providing the exact timestamp doesn't help.
Both have their uses.
Think about the task of correlating online events with events from your memory.
Suppose you see a quote from you, saying something rude that seems out of character. Knowing that it was however many hundreds of days ago is useless; see that it was July 27, 2011, at 4am, and you'll say "oh, yeah, somewhere in late July we had X and Y over drinking into the wee hours... those #%#$%s must have been futzing with my computer after I fell asleep, and somehow I never noticed".
Most importantly -- you have to predict the reasons people will be looking at dates, and this varies. Gmail shows both because they can't guess; email can carry so much different stuff.
HN post/comment timestamps beyond a few days ago can be notated in number of days as far as I'm concerned; I don't need to know what year, even -- just "this is old".
The timestamp on a blood sugar reading should include time of day (and possibly day of week even) -- a full timestamp, minimum -- to be useful.
Etc..
If I needed an exact date, I would do something like the following (python)
>>> import datetime >>> datetime.date.today()-datetime.timedelta(864) datetime.date(2010, 4, 13)
$ date -d '864 days ago'
Tue Apr 13 13:46:16 EDT 2010(a) relative dates are much less useful further they get from present date; Facebook should probably have a cut off after which exact date is shown
(b) relative dates do not replace exact dates; you should still make it relatively easy to see the exact timestamps even if it requires an extra click
When timezone no longer matters, e.g. after a few days, then I would switch back to absolute dates exactly to avoid such incomparable expressions.
However, that being say, I thing relative dates do have a point of diminishing returns. For me, past a week is when I'd prefer to see actual dates.
I do agree that "over a year ago" is pretty vague at not as useful to the user as "August 2011." The word "about" gets ambiguous when dealing with longer spans of time. Obviously "about" is ambiguous by definition, but the degree of ambiguity increases as one goes further away from the event.
His microdata example is also only write if you having upgraded to HTML5, in which case <time> is obviously better.
It's on the HN front page. Look at this thread. The joke's on us.
Take a piece of information like '12 Apr 2012 10:09 AM PST'--there's a fair bit of mental arithmetic required to work out how long ago that was, if 'how long ago' is important to you. And it's different arithmetic depending on whether you're looking at it on the 12th of April (time zone adjustments, crossing noon)or the 14th of June (how many days in April and March). Multiply this by the number of dates on a screen, and you might end up with a lot of information noise.
A lot of the time, a quick, rough idea of 'how long ago it was' is really helpful. I wouldn't be so quick to label relative dates as stupid. Information overload is a real problem for humans, not so much for computers. It really depends on the circumstances, but for most UIs designed to be read by people, relative dates can work really well.
2012-04-12 10:09 PST
Since it is August 2012 now it is roughly 4 months ago (and one rarely needs more precision than this).
They did change the format they used when displaying individual tweets, I'm guessing this was intentional.
You do have a good point that touches on the dilemma of the internet archivist, but this is certainly a problem easier to solve than the ones faced by people attempting to preserve software or video games, for example.
if the date is less than a couple of days old (or whatever threshold works for you) display a relative date. This is useful because in the short term relative dates are more useful to the user. If it's older than the threshold display a YYYY-MM-DD H:m:s or whatever format floats your boat.