What does the Bird know?
Brief History of Twitter
Twitter’s inception occurred in 2006, by Jack Dorsey and a handful of other members; Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. The idea was originally supposed to be based on SMS messages as the primary means of communication, instead of internet based as we know of it today.
Twitter wasn’t always called Twitter as well, it used to be named Twttr, due to naming trends at the time (Tumblr, Flickr, etc). Shortening up words as shown previously in texting became popular at this time, which saw many tech companies emulating the trend.
How To Obtain Your Twitter Archives
To download your Twitter archive, follow the steps
here, which are given by Twitter. Be careful, as there are two types of archives you can download, a comprehensive archive of all your data, which was linked above, which is much more difficult to parse and read. The less comprehensive Archive only contains your Tweets, but Twitter gives you a nice HTML page to easily view your Tweets in a timeline. This less comprehensive Twitter archive can be downloaded by following Twitter’s guide
here.
Data in the Comprehensive Twitter Archive
In the comprehensive Twitter archive discussed above, it is clear to see how much data Twitter actively collects and stores on its users. What follows is an overview of data obtained through this comprehensive Twitter archive:
Phone Number |
Account Suspension |
Direct Messages |
IPs Used to Log In |
Periscope Account Info |
Email |
Ad Engagements |
Direct Message Media |
Liked Tweets |
Protected History |
Username |
Ad Impressions |
Profile Media |
Created Lists |
Saved Searches |
Account ID |
Date of Birth |
Direct Message Headers |
Member Lists |
Screen Name Change |
Creation Date |
Inputted Age |
Change of Email Address |
Subscribed Lists |
Verification Status |
Display Name |
Ad Inferred Age |
Facebook Connections |
Moments |
|
Timezone |
Blocked Users |
Followers |
Muted Accounts/Words |
|
Creation IP Address |
Connected Applications |
Following |
Devices Used |
|
Analysis of the Comprehensive Archive
Twitter-Archive-Parser is a Python script I created to parse out some of these artifacts. For more information on this script, please visit my
blog post about it and the
GitHub repository.
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