Day: 20 January 2013

Reconnecting with half the memories

hajimemashite watashin wa. Ian desu. dozo yoroshiku

Its great looking through my Twitter archive/dump but its frustrating that I can only read half of the conversation.

Funny looking back at this tweet as it was less than a week before I had my brush with death…

6 May 10
These early morning meetings are killing me, wondering what people would say if I started setting meetings for 6pm and 7pm?

Yes just imagine… Anyway I can clearly see the gap in my tweeting From 7th May 2010 to June 9th 2010. Not a single tweet…! I also noticed theres no Direct messages in the archive so I can see… Which is a good and bad thing I guess?

Anyway enough doom and gloom…

Here’s is that classic moment which I’ve used to talk about how great open sharing can be/or how twitter is better than facebook.

From 4th January 2009…

Unfortunately you will need to read it from the bottom upwards

Although you know what happens, so it doesn’t really matter 🙂

“thank you but…” passing the card back.”I have a boyfriend, he’s picking me up from the station” so no joy but thanks twitterverse View on Twitter

so I gave her the card and smiled. she looked at it read it with richards jp on one side and my contacts on the other and said…. View on Twitter

Ok headphones are off and shes packing up. Here comes my moment. Geez  View on Twitter

@richardsproject: Ok Richard wrote it, the card is ready. I just need to know what it says View on Twitter

At Stockport View on Twitter

So i was planning to offer her one of my kitkats but i like the card thing. if Richard tells me what it says  View on Twitter

@richardsproject: Tell me what it says and i’ll do it View on Twitter

@sheilaellen: Nope only 10mins left View on Twitter

@JeniT: Ummm like what? View on Twitter

@billt: Ok now i’m laughing out loud, thanks Bill. Think she is running Windows too actually. But shes watching a film View on Twitter

Just passed Mansfield so not long till we get to Manchester View on Twitter

@cisnky: Now that would be good. But how do I start that conversation 🙂 Geez I wonder what @tommorris makes of all of this View on Twitter

@davemee: The twitterverse is my strategy, come on people I got 30mins left to make a good impression and type up my blog entries View on Twitter

@sheilaellen: Shes got headphones on, so that won’t work View on Twitter

Sitting opposite a stunning Japanese lady with a oversized acer laptop. Playing footsie under the table but no joy… View on Twitter

Microblogging dataportability at last?

Twitter data dump

Finally got the ability to download my tweets… Over 6 years of tweets in 6.8 meg of files.

It comes in a zip file not a tar file which is interesting because Facebook uses Tars for its data dumps. Structures interesting because its less of a dump and more a formal backup of your data complete with HTML file bring it all together. Theres a README.txt file which reads…

# 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.
—
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.

Most of the data is JSON which bugs me a little only because I would personally have to transform it all to XML but alas I’m sure everyone loves it. The CSV spreadsheets are odd and could do with being XML instead of CSV but once again sure its useful to someone out there. The nice thing is there is tons of meta around each microblog/tweet including the geo-location, time and device/client. Even the URLs have some interesting things around it, because I was wondering how they were going to deal with shorten urls, retweets and mentions…

 “urls” : [ {
“indices” : [ 69, 89 ],
“url” : “http://t.co/GSzy55vc”,
“expanded_url” : “http://epicwerewolf.eventbrite.com/”,
“display_url” : “epicwerewolf.eventbrite.com”
} ]

Doesn’t always work… specially when using urls shortener which don’t keep the url after a certain time period. Interesting internally twitter always uses its own t.co for everything…

Right now I’m just interested in the period around my brush with death… Real shame theres no references to mentions you’ve had, as I would have loved to have seen some of those. Guess Twitter were not going to delve into that can of worms…

I want to know why theres no status.net inporter?

Cnet have a overview of how and what to do with the archive. Thanks Matt