Downloading Your Twitter Archive
A Twitter archive is a database of your own tweets, organized chronologically. Sometimes, when you have already tweeted too much, you may be surprised yourself how much updates you have already posted. If you are curious enough to know your Twitter history from the very beginning when you signed up on Twitter and made your first tweet, then this article is for you.
How to download your Twitter archive
To grab your Twitter archive and browse through it, simply follow these steps:
- First, log in to Twitter.
- Next, click on the gear drop-down icon above and choose Settings.
- Go to the Account tab and look for ‘Your Twitter Archive’.
- Simply click on ‘Request your archive’ and a dialog box will inform you that you will receive an e-mail soon that contains your Twitter achieve, which will be processed first. With this, you’ll just have to wait for a few days for your archive to be available on your e-mail, so check once in a while.
- When your downloadable Twitter archive is ready, you will see it on your e-mail. Simply click ‘Go now’ or click the link below that button.
- A download button on Twitter will appear on your browser. Simply click on it to download your zip file archive.
- Extract this zip file to anywhere in your computer.
- You can now browser your Twitter archive. Simply click on index.html and it will open up on your browser (e.g. Firefox, Chrome) for you to browse. All your tweets can be viewed depending on what year and month you select from the bars on the right. You can also type a word on the search box to search all of your tweets for a specific word or hashtag. Each tweet can also be opened to its permanent link, so that you can individually delete them if you wish.
- You also have the tweets.csv file in case you need it for data gathering. A CSV is a comma-separated value file which can also be opened in Microsoft Excel as a spreadsheet / database of your tweets from the very first tweet to the latest one.
Conclusion
Analyzing and downloading your Twitter archive can be done either for analytics or simply just for fun or curiosity. If you know a friend who wants to know about all the tweets he or she have made in the past, share this tutorial with that person.
