My Twitter archive

Recently Twitter started giving users the ability to download an archive of their tweets. As a long time user (been tweeting since December 2006) I was very keen to have this option. They finally flicked on the switch for me a couple of days ago. I downloaded my archive this morning.

You get a zipped folder of data, with a readme file:

# How to use your Twitter archive data

The simplest way to use your Twitter archive data is through the archive browser interface provided in this file. Just double-click `index.html` from the root folder and you can browse your entire history of Tweets from inside your browser.

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In the `data` folder, your Twitter archive is present in two formats: JSON and CSV exports by month and year.

* CSV is a generic format that can be imported into many data tools, spreadsheet applications, or consumed simply using a programming language.

## JSON for Developers

* The JSON export contains a full representation of your Tweets as returned by v1.1 of the Twitter API. See https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1 for more information.
* The JSON export is also used to power the archive browser interface (index.html).
* To consume the export in a generic JSON parser in any language, strip the first and last lines of each file.

To provide feedback, ask questions, or share ideas with other Twitter developers, join the discussion forums on https://dev.twitter.com.

Very easy to use.

This screenshot shows how my tweets have increased over the years.

It is interesting to note that after I started using Twitter in December 2006, I stopped briefly and did not tweet again until March 2007. I suspect it’s because very few people I knew were using it at that time. Like having a phone but no one else did – no one to call!

My first tweets:

I’m mortified to see that my first ever tweet began with the word “procrastinating”!

I didn’t really tweet all that much until 2009. Things really started to take off in May 2009 (335 tweets) – at the Educause Australasia conference which was held in Perth that year. From 7 tweets in 2006, 755 tweets in 2007, and 912 tweets in 2008, 2009 saw 2146 tweets. I think I actually met a few tweeps I’d only interacted with online face to face at that conference. Educause was when I really started to see how amazing the Twitter backchannel is.

2010 exploded – 8331 tweets that year – with VALA 2010 in February really kicking things off for me. From VALA 2010 I started really building my PLN and I met many of the people in my network now at that conference. February 2012 was my busiest month to date on Twitter: 1255 tweets that month – at VALA 2012.

Actually if you look at the graph you will see that February has usually been busy in terms of tweets – conference time! (This year will be interesting as I won’t be attending Info Online.)

My total number of tweets from 2006 – 2012 is 29622.

I don’t think there’s anything that earth-shatteringly interesting to anyone except me in this archive. The interest for me is in seeing how I reacted to events, nationally/internationally/online, and personally. Also I will see if I can discern any development in my Twitter style.