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11:28 am Wed
Jun 1, 2011
Just asked @dickc about why Twitter won't let me get at older tweets.
Costolo's reply, as paraphrased by Joshua [on Twitter]:
Basically? The infrastructure isn't there.
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land addressed this shortcoming back in 2010, with a pointer to third-party services that can help: basically, Topsy is it. Or, I suppose, you could always ask the Library of Congress!
When “social media” meant “blogs,” there were many tools, services and protocols that comprised an infrastructure for federated, open, loosely joined interaction: the rise of the social giants has killed off much of this infrastructure, all but erasing it from our memories.
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So, like Boing Boing’s search then?
Comedy for you; tragedy for me.
Oh for god’s sake.
Can we come back to reality here and realize that “twitter” is a storage and retrieval mechanism for small strings of … wait for it … plain ascii text.
If the core of twitter is more than 8 lines of perl code, the person who “designed” it is an asshole. And that’s the facts, jack.
So to speak of “historical tweets” and then to further speak of “infrastructure” behind said historical tweets as if they even remotely resemble anything complex is just clownish.
You can access historical Tweets that are relevant to you on PostPo.st ( http://postpo.st )
The results you get are Tweets, links, photos and videos from the people you follow.
Try it: http://postpo.st/search/links
Since Topsy got it from Twitter, wouldn’t it be fair for Twitter to get it back from Topsy?
Whenever they have their, you know, “infrastructure” in order.
> “Relevance” is the focus, rather than chronological order
I’ve thought for a long time that Twitter could do with some sort of threaded conversation, to avoid the eventual back-and-forth arguments and widen conversation to a larger audience.
I know Twitter is meant to be about following updates; but without a more engaging discussion, Twitter is turning into a poor version of an announcement service; something that RSS often does better.
It’s a shame that this ‘relevance’ sounds more like Facebook’s useless ‘Top News’ than an attempt to make Twitter more social.
> I’ve thought for a long time that Twitter could do with some sort of threaded conversation
You mean like identi.ca and other StatusNet free-as-in-freedom distributed microblogging sites have had for ages?
> > I’ve thought for a long time that Twitter could do with some sort of threaded conversation
> You mean like identi.ca and other StatusNet free-as-in-freedom distributed microblogging sites have had for ages?
According to their website, yes! I’d not heard of them before; I’m going to sign up. Thanks!