Comments on: Twitter is making and then destroying history

By: benjaminwright

benjaminwright — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:38:23 +0000

Many enterprises like local governments are using Twitter and other social media for official communications. These enterprises often have legal reasons to archive the communication (the tweets). Loss of features like hashtags is too bad. I argue a practical archive technique is to gather as much as practical in the user’s enterprise email account. http://legal-beagle.typepad.com/wrights_legal_beagle/2010/02/social-network-compliance.html

By: Rebecca Caroe

Rebecca Caroe — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:56:08 +0000

Richard

This is a great post, thanks for highlighting. I am looking into some of the new develoments in real-time search and I now see that there’s a gaping void in non-real-time or historic search.

Would it be great to be able to search ‘as if’ we were in 2004 …. it’d be a bit like a time machine. But I don’t know if historic index files are kept by the major search engines.

HEre’s what I wrote about search
http://creativeagencysecrets.com/2009/06/28/search-engines-have-a-way-to-go-to-improve/

Rebecca

By: Twitter is making and then destroying history « TOPICS

Twitter is making and then destroying history « TOPICS — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:49:43 +0000

[...] DC 3:49 pm on June 27, 2009 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment Tags: iran (20), social media (30), twitter (17) Twitter is making and then destroying history « Richard Stacy @ Stacy Consulting. [...]

By: Apologies « The social media revolution (in 15 minutes)

Apologies « The social media revolution (in 15 minutes) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:34:55 +0000

[...] Twitter – problems with it in terms of creating but also losing history [...]

By: richardstacy

richardstacy — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:48:46 +0000

It is true – we haven’t actually lost the tweets (hopefully) – but I guess the point I am making is that in the social media world simple availability of data in an archive isn’t sufficient. Ease of availability is what is necessary in order to generate the processes of collective analysis that drive soacial media.

This perhaps also gives a clue on the commercial future of Twitter – being not charging for the infrastructure itself, either directly or through ads, but through provision of search and analysis tools.

By: Inis Lovely

Inis Lovely — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:43:13 +0000

Twitter doesn’t archive at all? That is a problem.

Just as the writings and letters from our Founding Fathers supplement the Constitution, and the scraps of newspapers give us insight to the thinking of that era, communications in history are important.

Following the #iranelection stream has just fascinated me. Could social media change international relations across the globe by letting citizens speak to one another instead of governments filtering information flow?

By: Kevin Makice

Kevin Makice — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:30:15 +0000

This is a very important issue, I agree, that presents a number of technical as well as social problems. However, it is important to be clear that Twitter search limitations are not the equivalent of Twitter archive limitations.

To the best of my knowledge, Twitter hasn’t purged any of their 2 billion or so tweets. They exist in the database, waiting for some point in the future when their engineers can release historical search. The constraint of how far back you can search is arbitrary, to help with whatever technical stresses they have at the moment.

In the meantime, this is a space where third-party development can help the Twitter ecosystem. There are some tools to allow individuals to download a local copy of all tweets (up to about 4-8K records, depending on how far back the API goes) in a variety of formats (text, Excel, XML, PDF). The search limitations prevent such tools from creating archives of hashtags in any meaningful way, but regular polling of Twitter could certainly create such records on an ongoing basis.

It would be great if someone would (or has already) created such a tool to capture the data for the Iranian election corpus. The API is simple enough to use, you could program that tool if no one else has.

By: richardstacy

richardstacy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:05:11 +0000

And that is one little piece of history that has gone – unless and until we have the ability to preserve the intangible things such as spaces / tags as well as the institutionalised things / places such as individual tweets.

By: Eric Lykins

Eric Lykins — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:44:05 +0000

I was the first to send the #OFA hashtag @BarackObama. It could have been coincidence, but @barackobama used it later that day. I wish I had saved the page with the #OFA search that showed that timeline.

By: richardstacy

richardstacy — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:36:55 +0000

History is indeed what we look back on – but what is history? Its foundation is the original source documentation. If we lose our access to the original source, we lose history and are left entirely at the mercy of selective interpreatation or revisionism. Given that Twitter’s role in making and recording history does not lie in the individual tweets, but in the spaces wherein this is brought together, if we lose these spaces, we lose the record, we lose history.