Twitter, ten years, timeline and chronologically speaking

Twitter

There is a buzz on the Twitter at the moment about the “ten year timeline”

Andy Baio on Twitter provided an easy link that showed your Twitter timeline from ten years ago (if you followed the same people you do now).

Looking over the feed from that time, it’s interesting to see how different Twitter would have been for me, than it is now. Back then I followed a lot less people (and I have stopped following some I followed back then), so it’s not entirely accurate reflection of what Twitter would have been like.

However there is a lot less commercial stuff and a lot less tweeting of news and links. There are no animated GIFs and no images, and no web page previews for links, so the feed is very textual, compared to my feed today. Today’s feed on the left and the 2008 feed on the right.

Twitter, ten years, timeline and chronologically speaking

You can use this search method, even if you weren’t on Twitter ten years ago and you can of course change the date as well.

The search query is

filter:follows until:2008-05-25 -filter:replies

Twitter

What I found equally interesting, but more useful was how you can use the search function to get a strict reverse-chronological timeline with no algorithm bases tweets (or advertising). From this tweet.

By the way, if you remove the date parameter from that search and click “Latest,” you get a strict reverse-chronological timeline with no algorithm junk.

https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/999704968524324864

filter:follows -filter:replies

This is how I remember Twitter in the early days. So that link has been added to my favourites bar.

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