If Twitter Had Been Around In The ’90s

If Twitter had been around in the ’90s, don’t you think it would be fun to come to go back and look at your tweets from that decade? Twitter is kind of like a diary, and to me, much more so than Facebook. I think it would be like going through a photo album and remembering special times.

Tweets only show up in Twitter search for a short time, and there are all kinds of websites that claim to allow us to view old tweets, but most of them seem wonky. TwimeMachine seems fast and easy; however, since it can only display 3200 tweets (due to Twitter’s API restrictions on developers), it’s not very useful for me. Since I send around 100 tweets each day, it only displays my tweets for the past month. Another restriction is that it only displays your own tweets, not the tweets of others.

Also, unfortunately, the entire world’s tweets archived at the Library of Congress can only be viewed by approved researchers. That blows. So, it looks like viewing really old tweets might be more of a challenge than we might have thought. On the TweetSmarter blog, I found a post called All The Easiest Ways To Search Old Tweets. It’s pretty good, and I found this little chart there listing the different services. (Searchtastic, which is on here, is no longer in service)

Just remember, if you log into any of these sites using your Twitter username and password, you might want to “revoke their access” to your Twitter account when you are finished playing around. You can do this on Twitter on the web (not through an app) in settings. If you forget this step, anyone with access to that website also technically has access to your Twitter account forever.

What if Twitter was around in the 90s? What if we could all go back and view our tweets from that time? What would we have tweeted about? The bloggers at pleated-jeans wondered this too, and they posted some possible tweets that we might have seen back then. This is so much fun! I wish they would do this again with tweets from the ’80s. Mine would probably read, “I just got the high score on Pac-Man. Schweeeeeet! Mom said I could play one more quarter.”

Header Image Credit: [I Beat You]