Getting Your Twitter Archive

I'm not always an early adopter, but I was with Twitter. The simplicity and connectivity it provides has been consistent over the years in ways that the fadish social networks, Myspace, Facebook, and now LinkedIn, have never been. They all try to do too much and their popularity succumbs to the weight of that cancerous growth. Over the years Twitter has gone back and forth with releasing their data. In the early days you could get a feed of every tweet as it was posted. Then their API gave away too much power so they limited it. As a historian I have always wanted to capture the complete record of my tweets but because there are over 20 thousand of them there hasn't really been a feasible way until now.

Getting your Twitter Archive:

1). Click on the gear next to the search field and select "Settings".

2). Select "Account" from the menu on the left if it isn't selected already.

3). Scroll all the way to the bottom where it says "Your Twitter archive".

4). Just click on the big shiny bottom that says "Request your archive" and you're off to the races. Twitter will send you a nice email with a link to a screen where you can download a zip file of all your tweets: pictures, links, posting source, and the whole sheebang both in a CSV and as a local webpage you can view in a web browser. It says it may take a while, but I got the email in just a few minutes.

5). After clicking the link in the email, your downloading goodness can begin!