Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Showing posts with label finding old tweets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label finding old tweets. Show all posts

Wednesday, 23 April 2014

April 2014, finding hashtagged tweets from November 2013 - a case study

Earlier today I spotted (I have a saved search on Twitter for my own blog) that someone (@PH_AdvocateEU) had been trying to uncover old tweets from a conference, using information in an even older blog post of mine which is now ridiculously out of date.

Since I like trying to find old tweets and haven't done it for a while I got in touch and asked if I could use it as a case study, to see what could be found. They agreed and I had a look - not much through usual methods but a 'handsearch' (combing through participants' tweets) looks the most promising, but it is the most labour-intensive unfortunately.

The hashtag in question is #EUCOPDBrx13

All the tweets that I've collected (there are more out there, but fiddly to uncover) are in this Storify:
#EUCOPDBrx13 - a collection of conference tweets

1. Has anyone already done the work for you - not in this case
It's possible that someone else has collected the tweets together and embedded them into a blog post or Storify etc, so search for the tag there first (you can use Google's Blog Search tool http://www.google.co.uk/blogsearch) - I didn't find anything on either site in this particular case though.

Sometimes people add a widget to their website which feeds in hashtagged tweets and stuff can be picked up from them (not in this case though it seems).

Note that there may be paid-for services that do this, but I'm afraid I don't know about them. If you have a server and know what an API is you may be able to call them up from Twitter's servers.



2. Twitter.com - a few
Twitter's own search box is a really good place to start, I've recently been surprised and delighted to find really old tweets on it - note though that I'm using the web browser version, not a smartphone or tablet app.

When you first search anything on Twitter you're shown the 'top tweets', you need to click on 'All' to see what else is available... and then you need to scroll down to the end (and keep scrolling until you're met with a note saying 'Back to top' which is Twitter's way of telling you that all available tweets are loaded).

You can see them here (although as time passes fewer of them will appear presumably) https://twitter.com/search?q=%23EUCOPDBrx13%20&src=typd&f=realtime

Doing this brought up 21 tweets - one was @PH_AdvocateEU telling me which hashtag to look for and seven of them were from 'bots' (automated accounts) reporting that the tag was (at the time of the tweet being sent) trending, which certainly suggests that there should be quite a lot of tweets.

Below was the earliest tweet I could find (it's a picture of the tweet with its address beneath it because embedding tweets doesn't seem to work very well on this blog. Subsequent tweets are embedded and show up as plain text).


https://twitter.com/EPHA_EU/status/406044863554019328

























If you are using Storify or Wordpress.com you don't need to use the Embed Code to add a tweet, just its URL. Here are the URLs of the tweets above. If you hover over the datestamp (or timestamp) of the tweet you can then right click / copy link location to get the URL.

https://twitter.com/EPHA_EU/status/406044863554019328 (this is the one shown as a picture above)
https://twitter.com/EU_ZMK/status/406050172041711616
https://twitter.com/EPHA_EU/status/406050856685953024
https://twitter.com/pelletieramelie/status/406051426520297472
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406052050867191808
https://twitter.com/EU_ZMK/status/406056203069194240
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406110427458703360
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406111225538289664
https://twitter.com/EU_ZMK/status/406305632036597760
https://twitter.com/EFA_Patients/status/406420777429655552
https://twitter.com/EFA_Patients/status/407868926047956992
https://twitter.com/EFA_Patients/status/413333619768557568

I may have missed one or two!


3. Search Google - a couple
An ordinary search on Google can also bring up tweets. Don't forget to investigate cached copies of things - if you see a tiny green arrow to the right of a site's address click on that and choose cache (this is an archived copy of the page).

I found a couple that didn't show up when searching directly on Twitter
https://twitter.com/EFA_Patients/status/405963496632115201
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406042782110060544


4. Targeted search restricted to names - not much, not tried all!
We know who was tweeting about the conference
@EPHA_EU
@EU_ZMK
@pelletieramelie
@EU_COPD
@EFA_Patients

We know from the content of their tweets who else was there, or participating
@imi_Ju, @karinkadenbach, @IPCRG, @yankeeu, @EU_H2020, @mikegalsworthy, @mikakosinska, @NABedlington, @humedsci

Although it doesn't bring up much in this case it's worth adding these names to the hashtag (one by one alas, this is fairly laborious I'm afraid) to see if you can find any other tweets that they sent or were mentioned in.

To find tweets they sent
from:imi_Ju #EUCOPDBrx13

To find tweets mentioning them
@imi_Ju #EUCOPDBrx13

I'd have to concede that this hasn't been particularly successful in this case though!


4. Manually scroll back to the relevant point of people's timelines - very promising, but hard work
Twitter will let you scroll back 3,200 tweets' worth on anyone's page. If they're very chatty this might not help if you're looking five or six months later of course.

I tried this for @EU_COPD, and found this - they've published fewer than 500 tweets so scrolling through wasn't too onerous. Each of these could be captured in a storify by collecting the URL (where it says 28 Nov, in grey - that's the timestamp that has the unique address for the tweet).


I'm not going to collect all of the URLs but a couple are (the last two in this pic)
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406043881311318016
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406043106333966336



5. Instagram and other tools - haven't checked
People take pictures, they tag them - have a look on Instagram for the same tag and see if there's any info there (you can include these in Storify stories I think).




Posted by Jo at 00:17 5 comments
Labels: , , ,

Thursday, 14 April 2011

Google Realtime: Finding threaded conversations on Twitter as well as year old tweets

Shortened link for this post is http://is.gd/C9vfjG

******************************************

UPDATE 7 July 2011: Google Realtime is no longer with us. Initially it seemed to be temporarily offline while under-bonnet tinkering happened and it was assumed it would be hooked up with Google+ however it now seems that Google is no longer accessing Twitter's stream as the deal ended on 2 July 2011. This isn't great.

******************************************

1. Google Realtime
2. Storify
3. Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive
4. Library of Congress

1. Google Realtime is probably intended to let people watch tweets as they happen but a nice feature is that it can "re-run" older tweets from as far back as April 2010. I found tweets from me / sent to me back in 18 April 2010 by searching for both jobrodie and @jobrodie

An example or two

BoraZ, from 25 April 2010
"Yes, @JoBrodie I tell new Twitterers to import tweets into FriendFeed as the only reliable way to search old tweets years later."
We've agreed this is probably no longer true as FriendFeed's search is a bit unpredictable.

@MarkSpoff tweeted this on 7 October 2010
"@JoBrodie recording of ambient and other found sound is old as hills. Only now are the social tools there that make it something all can do."

@EvidenceMatters tweeted this, on 1 April 2011, about a 'hack your own sous-vide' event.
"@JoBrodie It was very interesting & it was good to meet diverse ple who attended. @mriemenschneidr was fund of experience/knowledge."
picked from this selection of tweets from Google Realtime's sesarch.

Threaded conversations
I think the bit that's really interesting about Google Realtime is its capacity to capture threaded conversations, even including people that you might not have been conversing with directly, but who were still contributing a conversational aside to the topic as a whole.

From @EvidenceMatters tweet above, the Realtime search results also have a 'Full conversation link' which gives this result.

A longer version is the result of a search for a conversation happening earlier today among @xtaldave @diamondlightsou and @clsresoff. The range of tweets can be found here, and selecting one of the 'Full conversation' links results in this thread, also shown below (in miniature).



I wonder if people will use Storify to capture tweets now that "What the hashtag" is no longer with us.

2. Storify and other curating tools
Storify lets you compile tweets (and other units of information, eg photos from Flickr, bits and bobs from Google, posts to Facebook groups - anything public basically) and compose a story around them. I suppose it's feasible to collect tweets as they come in, on a topic or with a hashtag, and save them as a Storify story.

"The New Curators: Weaving Stories from the Social Web" - this blog has a section on Storify and explains its use well. A nice example of the sort of use I'd put Storify to has been demonstrated by @kristinalford working with tweets from the #onsci tag.

"Onsci: Telling Better Science Stories" curated by Kristin Alford

I liked Storify the minute I saw it, it's very intuitive, has a nice interface and is easy to play around with. It takes a wee while to get your beta invite once you've registered so if you want to play around with something instantly, try the similar Keepstream. Here's an example I've just created. I prefer the interface and options given in Storify but this isn't bad. I didn't manage to get anywhere with Curated.By however.

These tools, rather than letting you find threaded conversations, let you create them from disparate units - according to the New Curators blog post linked above Robert Scoble has used the term "atoms" of information, and described curators as "information chemists" ;)

3. The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive
I've mentioned this before but I think it bears repeating. It doesn't let you find threaded conversations but it does let you see a random selection of your historic tweets - what's available will depend on when the archive crawled your tweets. My timeline has been visited six times over three years taking a snapshot of what was going on at the time it visited.

My tweets were first 'snapped' on 23 December 2008, and then another five times since.
http://waybackmachine.org/*/http://twitter.com/JoBrodie - on the first crawl I was following and followed by 66 people and had made 333 tweets. Here I am again on 21 September 2009. Unfortunately it doesn't let you go back and forwards in your timeline as you can (to a limited extent) on Twitter itself.

It's as if all your tweets were packed up at the end of the day into slim volumes but a year later you were only allowed to look at one of them... still, it's interesting to see some old tweets.

4. Library of Congress
The US Library of Congress has been given all public tweets, by Twitter, since 2006 - but I don't know know if it's possible for people to access this database yet, or ever. The linked blog (Twitter's) refers to Google Replay which is what's now known as Google Realtime, having previously spent time as Google Updates.




Posted by Jo at 23:28 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)