HOWTO: Find The Day That You Joined Twitter (And Your Very First Tweet)

If you've been on Twitter long enough, you start to get a little bit nostalgic. You wonder about days gone by; about connections made (and lost). You start to reminisce about firsts. When did I first join Twitter? What was my first tweet? The problem is: how do you find out? Thankfully, solutions are at hand. When Did I Join Twitter? This one is super-easy - just pay a visit to the appropriately-named When Did You Join Twitter?, enter your username (no need to enter a password), and enjoy. As you can see, I joined on March 8, 2008 - that's closing in fast on four years. What Was My First Tweet? If you're fairly new to Twitter - or don't say all that much - finding out your first tweet is also really easy. In fact, finding out your first 16 tweets is really easy. Simply head on over to MyTweet16.com, enter your username (also no need for a password), and away you go. Here's me: (I've crunched this image down to save space.) But there's the problem: as we've seen above, I've been on Twitter since March 8, 2008. MyTweet16 thinks I first tweeted on March 23, 2009, over a year later. What's up with that? Here's the thing. If you're prolific with your tweeting or have been on Twitter for a couple of years, finding out your first-ever tweet is a little bit tricky. See, the problem is Twitter currently only makes everybody's last 3,200 tweets available via its API, and that means if you've tweeted more than this your first-ever tweet isn't going to be available by conventional methods. So, to see our first tweet we'd really need to go back in time. Way back in time. And that's where The Wayback Machine comes in. What's Wayback? Why, it's the internet's very own archiver! Visit waybackmachine.org, enter the full path to your Twitter profile in the URL box (i.e., http://twitter.com/username, not just your username), click on show all, and cross your fingers. Why? Because even Wayback's a bit hit-and-miss about the content it actually decides is worth recording, and this includes your Twitter profile. Wayback captures pages of content, and it first took a snapshot of my Twitter profile on April 11, 2008. Click on that calendar button, and you can scroll down the page to see my earliest recorded tweet - April 6, 2008. Which was this: I trust you're suitably inspired. Worth preserving, eh? (Give me a break - I was working a night shift at the time.) Still, it's not my first tweet, which happened a little less than a month earlier. That's still out there, somewhere, and maybe some genius has figured out a way to get to this via your status number. Until then, for me, this will have to do - I'm out of options (and ideas). I hope you'll have better luck. If you do, and if you manage to find my very first tweet, please let me know.

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HOWTO: Find The Day That You Joined Twitter (And Your Very First Tweet)

Shea Bennett

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Shea Bennett