Twitter Starts Rolling Out Option To Download Your Twitter Archive In One File | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Starts Rolling Out Option To Download Your Twitter Archive In One File

techcrunch.com

102 pointsiProject30 comments

I got mine this weekend. It's a solid implementation, a great 1.0 and something Twitter and the engineers who worked on it should be proud of.

When you click the "get my tweets" button, it kicks off a process in Twitter land somewhere. A few minutes later, you get an email with a link to a zip file.

The file contains a full archive of every one of your public tweets, including @replies you've made, but not DM's or replies to you or follower/following information, etc. It's just your public tweets. The tweets themselves are stored as CSV and JSON. Which is actually pretty cool because it means you can build your own apps, or archive apps like Thinkup can ingest your tweets, if you're so inclined.

As the article states, you can explore your archive via a web app that all works client side in a browser, based on Bootstrap, natch. The app works quite well. You can search your archive quickly and easily. It points to the canonical URL of the tweet on twitter.com. There's some pretty basic visualization of your tweet archive.

The javascript that runs the app is all minified so it's kind of hard to explore. The application is named "Grailbird" which I thought was kinda clever ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory-billed_Woodpecker ).

On a personal note, it was pretty great (though often cringeworthy) to be able to roll back through 6 years of tweets. I found the very first tweet that the woman I'd end up marrying every replied to. The tweets that led to friendships and career changes.

It's a solid first step. Nice work, Twitter.

Thanks for this, I was immediately curious what's included and how it works.

Would you be willing to share an example of the JSON structure for a tweet?

Here's my first ever tweet. There's a separate JS file for every month of tweets. The JSON object itself is named according to the month.

  Grailbird.data.tweets_2006_12 = 
  [{
    "source" : "web",
    "entities" : {
      "user_mentions" : [ ],
      "media" : [ ],
      "hashtags" : [ ],
     "urls" : [ ]
    },
    "geo" : {
    },
    "id_str" : "547413",
    "text" : "counting down the seconds until 5",
    "id" : 547413,
    "created_at" : "Sat Dec 02 00:57:17 +0000 2006",
    "user" : {
      "name" : "Jim Ray",
      "screen_name" : "jimray",
      "protected" : false,
      "id_str" : "35623",
      "profile_image_url_https" :   "https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1234214846/avatar_normal.jpg,
      "id" : 35623,
      "verified" : false
    } ]

The CSV data is much more basic

  547413,2006-12-02 00:57:17 +0000,counting down the seconds until 5,

Does anyone know the purpose of having both the "id" and "id_str" attributes?

It's probably because modern tweet IDs are larger than a 32-bit integer. Presumably some JSON parsers aren't too hot on parsing bigints, so they give you the option of having a string instead.

Ahh, that makes sense. Thanks! (And thanks to andrewf as well!)

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/10/19/the-twitter-id-sh...

In Javascript (as well as Lua and PHP) ints are -- under the hood -- doubles. This means they can only represent a 53-bit int: outside that range they start to alias. You can see this in effect in a JS REPL:

10000000000000001 === 10000000000000000 True

I've been using TweetNest (http://pongsocket.com/tweetnest/) for a while to get an archive of my own tweets and will continue to do so, but it's nice that they're providing an official way. TweetNest, as well as all other tweet archivers, are limited by the 3200 (IIRC) tweet limit in the API, I wonder if they'll be adding support to import from the backup that will presumably have everything.

When will there be an option to upload the archive to App.net?

Why would you want to do that? Then the timeline of everyone that follows you would be spammed with updates.

Ideally (not that this would ever happen) the third party service (e.g. App.net) would be able to query Twitter as to the veracity of each user's archive (verify an md5 hash or whatever kids use these days) then allow the tweets to be backdated into their system.

I imagine that dealing with the t.co URLs, and mentions by/conversations with Twitter users who aren't on App.net, or use a different name, would be a problem too.

> By the end of the year I’ve already promised this, so the engineers – when I promised it publicly they’re already mad at me so they can keep being mad at me.

Wow I would hate to work at Twitter.

The disdain for developers is probably not restricted to third parties.

I'd be really curious to know more about Twitter's database setup. There's clearly something that they've done for scale that makes this a difficult thing. Otherwise, implementing a button that SELECT * FROM tweets WHERE user_id = 1; wouldn't take long to implement.

Twitter moved on from having a single table of tweets a long long time ago. I imagine archived tweets (which aren't necessarily that old) are spread out in multiple archive databases and perhaps not even in traditional db formats. And I imagine that, as a rule, no user facing code is allowed to touch any of the databases, but rather goes through services with heavy caching. So that a seemingly simple feature is an engineering challenge really isn't that surprising. Twitter is optimized for very recent content.

I can only guess the format for archived tweets is very different from newer one, maybe just a compressed text file, which the engineers have to automate extracting and parsing at scale. Doesn't seem that hard, but the format was probably a hack job back in the day and there are probably a lot of considerations, e.g. metadata like RTs and favorites.

Plus, CEO's comments sound like it's been set up as a side project. The kind of management style books like Mythical Man Month and Peopleware warned us about.

Indeed, this would also explain why the search function only allows one to view tweets going back seven days.

I interviewed with a Twitter search engineer and he told me that that's because their in-memory search index is not big enough hold all tweets ever posted. On top of that, their efforts to scale up the index are counteracted by the ever-increasing volume of tweets posted per day.

And the reason it's not big enough is because they don't want to invest in it. They found out search is not as monetizable as they thought it would be, and at the same time they cannot take away the functionality. The compromise is to keep what they have.

Lots of guessing, hypothesizing, and imagineering for information that is readily available. Here's a start:

http://engineering.twitter.com/2012/04/mysql-at-twitter.html

http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/12/19/how-twitter-store...

http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/sessions/g...

http://www.slideshare.net/yousukehara/introduction-of-twitte...

http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/05/introducing-flockdb.h...

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/06/Twitter-Architecture

http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/05/introducing-flockdb.h...

https://github.com/twitter

Without knowing what's actually going on internally that's just a snap judgement. If the engineers are actually being pressured to achieve it in too short a time then sure, however it's quite likely that "mad at [him]" means in a friendly way, and he's going "would love it if you can prove me right, otherwise don't worry, I'm already telling the press that I was an idiot who spoke without checking with you, so if we're late then it's not a problem".

I've never worked for a company where executives and/or salespeople didn't promise features that don't exist without first consulting engineering.

Really? I know this is a subtly different thing but is it possible to name a company that has always delivered what it said it would when it said it would? Apple would be my nearest candidate, but they have messed up here.

I was pretty impressed with Facebook's data export option as well (click "Download a copy" on https://www.facebook.com/settings).

I want my DM archive.

How far does it go back?

First sentence from the article:

"It looks like Twitter has started rolling out the option to let users download all their tweets"

To your first tweet

Reply on news.ycombinator.com