Where are my Tweets?!

It is immensely frustrating to discover that twitter is messing with our data. When I started saving tweets to my Twitter favorites, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to find them later (there are tweets that I know for sure are missing from my saved list).

I wonder how come Twitter is stable all of a sudden? My guess is that it's dealing with problems in ways we aren't noticing right away, those that fly under the radar like the favorites issue. In my account, I see that only seven pages of favorite can be saved, and I found about this only yesterday.

Apparently, I can save as much as I want but I wasn't informed by Twitter that it is erasing the Tweets from the backend of my list (double checked!).

My question therefore is: why the saved favorites and not the direct messages instead? After all, in settings, a user can choose to get the direct messages sent to an email account as well. I think it would have been smarter to clean up this data and not the favorites.

Please note that I've said "in my account." I've checked other accounts that have a lot of favorites saved, and they don't seem to have the same problem (but if you've used Twitter to save favorites tweets, I suggest you go and look to see if your saved tweets are there).

Twitter also has limited the number of viewable pages in each profile. Meaning, right now you can only see 10 pages of your or your friends' previous tweets.

In a discussion between Twitter and users that search their old tweets, I found this message:

@dacort replied:

Soooo....a followup question.

Will our own full archives ever be accessible to us again via the Twitter service?

Al3x answers:

Yes, that's absolutely a goal. I consider our service defective unless users can export all of their own content.

Unfortunately, for me that solution will not work because most of my old Tweets looks like this:

I found about it through Internet Archive, where you can enter your Twitter page and see some of your old data. Again, I've checked some other Twitter pages, and most of them showed me all the updates.

BTW, I think this is Scoble first tweet:


If it sounds from this post like I'm upset, I am. And, I'd like to explain why:

This is not my idea of microblogging. I've trusted Twitter to save my updates, and with the new search, I thought I'll be able to search for new/old data. In actuality, you can't search for old updates nor see them. Think about what would you do if Blogger or Wordpress lost over half of your previous blog posts... I'm sure you'd be very annoyed from it to say the least.

Twitter has become the most dynamic place for quick updates and conversations - they should respect their users enough to save their history because frankly, lots of valuable data is now down the drain.