Twitter has finally built a full search engine for its archived Tweets. That’s important because it has been incredibly hard in the past to find specific Tweets.
I’m on Twitter of course, and have been since sometime in December 2006. But this search engine fills in a few blanks.
My first Tweet was not the most exciting ever:
Working…
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) December 13, 2006
That was December 13. I then didn’t do anything for about three months when I published this helpfully:
Finally getting around to playing with Twitter.
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) March 12, 2007
Hello world
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) March 12, 2007
Hello again world
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) March 12, 2007
The first actual thing of interest was a few days later:
Playing with Bluetooth FM Radio Nano remote thingy.
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) March 21, 2007
I’m honestly not sure what that might have been.
Then this was squarely aimed at the only other people I really knew on Twitter – the tech guys at One Golden Square:
Disappointed that Martin Collins isn't playing Carmina Burana at the start of his new show. Does that mean no old jingles either?
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) March 26, 2007
Martin Collins is on the early shift at Magic these days – and back in One Golden Square. I’m not sure if he’s still using Carmina Burana…
Still playing with Yahoo Pipes and the Twitter feed
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) May 24, 2007
Yahoo Pipes!
Then I started doing something that I’d completely forgotten. I started using Twitter in the third-person. I’m honestly not sure why, and I suspect that it’s because other people were doing that. I certainly didn’t have someone Tweeting for me!
Adam is playing with Facebook applications…
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) May 25, 2007
Adam is recharging his camera's battery.
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) May 26, 2007
Adam is off to see the Pet Shop Boys.
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) May 27, 2007
Adam is annoyed that for some reason Sky failed to record The Apprentice – he's having to resort to "other means" to get it.
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) May 30, 2007
Adam is wondering how good an idea it is to advertise your general hungover/tiredness on Facebook (Adam is neither hungover nor tired incide
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) June 4, 2007
I’ve kicked The Apprentice habit you’ll be pleased to learn. And I still think it’s unwise to advertise your hangover on social media if your work colleagues follow you – particularly your boss.
Sometime in the second half of 2007, a lot of us at Virgin Radio started using Twitter in a different way, although most didn’t realise that they’d set up a Twitter account.
Twitter at the time let you receive free SMS messages from specific accounts. It still does (although it’s operator specific and Vodafone has recently cancelled this service).
Using a combination of the Virgin Radio shortcode for texting, and Twitter, James Cridland got everyone in the company to sign up to Twitter with their mobile phones ahead of our weekend away in Dublin.
Here’s what happened. You followed a Virgin Radio account and enabled SMS messaging from it. Then you sent a message to the Virgin Radio text number with a prefix (so that it skipped the studio inbox). That was then “posted” as a Virgin Radio Tweet. And everyone following that account then got an SMS with said Tweet.
Free SMS group messaging for everyone in the company while we went on our jaunt to the Emerald Isle!
Well there were a few issues.
Firstly, it was anonymous, since all the Tweets were coming from the Virgin Radio account. And people quickly realised this. You could make “humorous” comments about your colleagues and they wouldn’t know who was broadcasting them.
Secondly, the volume of texts that everyone was getting meant that before we’d reached Heathrow Airport on the way out, a lot of people’s phones were dead or clogged up with texts, and they were desperately asking how to unsubscribe!
I’m not sure how any of this is related and whether I somehow got accounts muddled for a while, but my Twitter timeline goes quiet now until early 2008.
Because I have nothing better to do tonight: http://dev.adambowie.com/weblog/archive/002362.html
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) February 10, 2008
(I’ll save you a click – it’s a live blog of the BAFTAs).
Looking forward to listening to In Our Time this week on Ada Lovelace! (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml)
— Adam Bowie (@adambowie) March 7, 2008
(You can still listen to this here or download it from this page)
The key thing to note is that I was no longer Tweeting in the third person.
Anyway, I don’t propose to run through all 12,900 or so Tweets from there to date, but it’s fun using Twitter search to see how things have changed.
One final thing to say is that I don’t know if old Tweets come with the