Twitter reminiscing - reading posts from the past

January 7, 2010 / Filed under: Reflection, Twitter, #fb

Photo of Doc Brown from Back to the Future
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Fabulously Lazy

"There still remains one little problem. If the me of the future is now in the past, how could you possibly know about it?"

  • "Doc Brown" in Back to the Future 3

I'm big into reminiscing. I love looking back at old photos, status updates, blog posts, music I was listening to, etc - from months or years ago. Even little details like what I was thinking, feeling, or otherwise subtle aspects of everyday life help to bring back memories and thoughts.

That's why I'm loving this new script I created that sends me my own Twitter updates from exactly a year ago.

Screenshot of Gmail message

It works up to a 15 minute range, so it's practically real-time updates from myself in the past being sent to me from this exact moment a year ago.

I can't tell you how interesting this is. It's like following someone else entirely, yet it's still me. Some updates I remember distinctly - where I was, what I was doing, etc; others not so much.

Often I surprise myself with what I was actually doing - where my memory fails me, the Twitter update does not lie.

I also learn a lot about myself - how far I've come, what's changed, and how I used to perceive things.

Technical details

If you're curious how I am doing this, it's not likely I can release such a script to the public because my updates have been mirrored to a local database for quite some time now. I did this to bypass Twitter's poor support for using the API to pull really old updates. It seems to let you go back only a short amount of time, like a couple of months.

So, using my own database is obviously a breeze, and free from API restraints. I simply have a cron job running every 15 minutes, checking for updates from a year ago, and emailing me the results.

In the future

In the future, I'd like to also send myself all published activity (not just Twitter) from a given moment one year ago, two, three, etc. A year seems to be a good measuring point.

So, this would include status updates, blog posts, photos, links, music, etc. It might be a lot of work accomplishing this, since many things I publish are not stored in a local database yet. I would need to query API's for different services.

Overall though, something tells me Marty and "Doc" from Back to the Future would be proud. Now if I could only get my future updates to be sent to me now, that would be out of this world.

Comments/Mentions