Questions on Twitter
12 December, 2008After weeks of intensive use of Twitter there are still questions left. This week I tried to find out how many pages I can go back with users who tweet a lot, like thousands and thousands of tweets. I checked two users and could only go back in time for 160 pages, with 20 tweets on a page that’s 3200 tweets. On page 160 the button ‘older’ is disabled. Next thing I wonder is where are all the older tweets? Are these lost somewhere in cyberspace? Could there be a back-up somewhere? I tried to use the Wayback machine but when I click on a link for 25 december 2007 for @silvertje I get an error. When I try to do the same for @marinalog on 13 december 2007 I get a page without any mark-up (lack of css) but with significant less tweets (5,969 in stead of 20,122 as I write this). This is the only page I can get from this user, although I can click on other usernames who have much more tweets today. Why can I only view these days in december 2007?
I feel honored for being part of your research. It is very common that complete indexes or archives are not available. In contrast to the millions of promised results Google presents us, we can only access a thousand. Technorati limits its index to only thirty days, as described in my thesis: Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations
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