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Comment on Ask HN: feedback on my app - search your Twitter timeline

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Definitely something that I have been wanting for years. Not sure about your implementation, though. You are aware that twitter search only goes back a couple of weeks? Somehow I couldn't find the things I expected to find.

Should I be more patient waiting for results (in case your app loads all my friend's tweets incrementally)? Then maybe you should display a spinner or something.

I'm fetching your timeline, you friends timelines, and indexing them with IndexTank.

It's incremental, so it may take a while. There's a limited number of allowed twitter API calls per hour, so in case you have lots of friends it'll take some time to have them all indexed.

About the status, there's a status bar on the upper right corner.

And you keep them even after they fall from Twitter search or the user timeline right, so eventually you'll be able to find tweets that are otherwise unreachable right?

I keep all the tweets. So the answer is Yes, you'll be able to find tweets that twitter's search does not let you find.

You can get around the twitter's search limit, by requesting their timelines, which goes up to 3200 of their tweets - you can get 200 tweets per API call.

I believe http://snapbird.org/ does this for "searching beyond Twitter history".

But if you try this on all of your friends, it soon becomes very, very slow. Eg if you have 100 people you follow, and they all have ~2000 tweets (or that's how deep you want to go), you'll have 1000 API requests. That's for one users' friends timeline.

I'm doing something like that on my app. Even requesting 200 tweets per API call, it takes a while to index when you have lots of friends.

Twitter seems to be over capacity, that's probably preventing your timeline from being indexed.

have you checked out http://tweetsaver.com?

I signed up with some tweet backup service a while ago. Unfortunately I forgot which one it was :-(

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