Status-Q

For all its problems over the years, one thing that Twitter has always done quite well is to give you access to backups of your data. You can request a dump of your archive and (a day or two later) download a ZIP file containing all of your Tweets and lots of other data besides, which you could process with your own code, but can also view using an HTML page included in the archive.

As the future of Twitter gets ever more uncertain, I ask for backups more frequently! You might want to do the same… one day you may not be able to.

I had an account in the very early days, and then deleted it, before joining again a little while later. So the first tweet on my current account, just over 15 years ago, says:

I didn’t have an iPhone back then – it existed, but I waited for the 3G version, which arrived a few months later. So quite a few of my early Tweets are about the fun things I could do with my iPod Touch, though I guess most of them would actually have been submitted using SMS text messaging, as you did back then.

I was also amused to see that one of my earliest messages was while barbecuing in the garden. I was recommending a local brand of sausage, which I can still recommend as one of my favourites: “Musk’s“.

That name, but attached to another owner, was to pop up on Twitter occasionally in the future.

I had actually met Elon Musk a couple of years before, but little did I know that his name would one day be so closely associated with this new social network. Back then, he was mostly known for PayPal and SpaceX, though he did have an intriguing side-interest in electric cars. It didn’t look likely that I (or most of my friends) would ever be able to afford one, though, so his other activities were of more interest.

These days, I still consume that fine brand of Newmarket sausages with the same frequency and enthusiasm as I did back then. Other things have changed, however. I drive an electric car every day, and have barely been in a petrol station for 7+ years. Twitter, on the other hand, I only look at a couple of times per week. Elon Musk is primarily responsible for both of those changes!