How to download and view your entire Twitter history
Did you know that Twitter has a feature that lets you get a copy of your entire tweet history? Available as an offline archive, it lets you see all your tweets in a nicely formatted HTML file viewable directly from your browser, or a CSV file.
In this post, we will show you how to download your Twitter archive and how to view your entire tweet history using a browser or a basic spreadsheet such as Excel or Numbers.
How to download your Twitter archive
1) Login to your Twitter account.
2) In the upper right corner of the screen, click on your profile icon, then select Settings and privacy.
3) Scroll to the bottom and click on the Request your archive button.
4) You won’t be able to download your archive instantly. Instead, you will get a message saying that a link to your archive will be emailed to you. Time probably varies depending on the size of your tweet history, but it took about a minute for Twitter to send me the entire @iDownloadBlog archive after requesting it.
5) Click on the Download now button in the email you receive from Twitter. This will take you to a web page where you can download the archive. Click on the Download button to download the .zip file to your computer.
6) Unzip the file and you will get access to your archive that includes several files, but more specifically an index.html file and a tweets.csv file. These are the two that we want to look into.
View your Twitter archive by year and month
The best way to view your Twitter archive is probably to do that using a web browser. Now let’s be clear, you will be looking at the archive using a web browser, but you do not need an internet connection. All the necessary files have already been downloaded locally and are available in the main file you downloaded in the previous step.
In the file you downloaded, double click on index.html. This will open a new window in your default web browser where you will be able to scroll through the years and months and look at each single tweet you sent.
This is my preferred way of browsing my Twitter history because it is clean and lets you browse per year and per month. It even shows you how many tweets you sent in a given month. For example, in April 2011, the iDB account sent out 249 tweets.
There is also a search field that allows you to dig into your archive based on keywords. While helpful in very specific cases, I find the search feature to be lacking. Still, I guess it’s better than no search function at all.
Get a more detailed look at your Twitter history
Another file worth looking into if you want more details and data about your tweet history is the tweets.csv file that was downloaded when you requested your archive.
This spreadsheet shows each of your tweets, including insane levels of related data such as the exact time you sent a tweet to the second, the ID of tweets you replied to or retweeted, and more.
While not as pleasing to look at as the web view of the archive, this one is more comprehensive.
Although the practical use of your Twitter history is fairly limited, I guess it is a good way to keep a local copy of your archive should you choose to delete your account.
Source link: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/01/12/how-to-download-view-entire-twitter-history/
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