So the other day I hit a full 5,000 tweets in the Twitter system. That’s a whole lot of 140 character messages, and it represents a pretty substantial chunk of writing — not necessarily writing that anyone would want to read, but it’s a fairly clear record of what I’ve been interested in since June 12, 2007 (which is apparently when I started tweeting). So what I wanted to do here, since none of you would be interested enough to go back through all of the 5,000 messages I’ve posted (and I don’t blame you), is try and pull out maybe the best 25 or 50, a digest of a digest of my life for the past few years.

There’s only one problem: only about a year of that time actually exists any more.

Here’s Twitter’s dirty little secret: you really only have access to about 3,200 of your tweets right now. I tried to go back and look at all of them, and to do so, I used a few different Twitter backup services (here’s one that works well called TwitterBackup, though you need Java installed, and here’s another called TweetBackup that is a little buggy but serves the purpose). But those services will only go back about 161 pages worth of tweets, or about 3,200. After that, you have no access to anything you’ve posted on Twitter’s site.

Here’s the farthest back that my tweets go (right now, anyway — I assume that whenever I post another 20 tweets, that page will disappear). I’m told that the rest of them still exist, and you can access them via permalink. Fortunately, I also started archiving my tweets on my blog a few months after I started, and so you can see many of them (and the permalinks) sitting in this blog’s archives, and if you click through the permalinks, you can see that they’re still sitting on Twitter’s servers, somewhere. They’re just unreachable by any form of normal browsing or exporting through the API.

Not very cool. Twitter seems like a bank guarding against an economic panic in this case — they’ve got just enough bandwidth to keep everyone humming and posting, but if people started going back and exporting their full archives or browsing back by years, their system just couldn’t take it. Will it ever? One suggestion on that Twitter support page would be to charge a fee to go back farther in the archives (which, truthfully, I’d probably pay at this point… right before I ditched the site for Facebook or some other service that did let me access everything I’ve posted), but at that point, they’re charging me for my content, which is also not cool.

My hope is that they’re just waiting on their engineers to come up with some sort of plan to let people back into the archives, or that they’re developing some sort of browsing system that isn’t such a drain on the rusty beige PC they’ve got running the whole system. But it’s a real bummer — I was very excited to go back and see what I first said when I came to the service (not even “first tweet” services can get past the 3,200 limit), but it appears that a good 2,000 of my tweets (representing about a year and a half of my life) are completely inaccessible. Poor show, Twitter.