Dig through social networks and find something awesome. The backlog of information on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit is staggering, and you probably very rarely venture back far. But get through the layers of digital debris and you can find all sorts of wonderful memories.
Here are a few tools that help you dig them up.
We’ve shown you how to time travel through the brief history of the Internet, and how to find anything in your Facebook timeline. Today we’re going to look at a few tools that make it easier to find old Twitter and Reddit posts, then show you a way to browse your own personal past every day. Let’s get started.
Trying to remember what your friends, or any Twitter user, was talking about back in 2011? Twayback Machine is a simple site that lets you figure out just that. Just type in any username and you’ll be re-directed to a Twitter search showing tweets from back in the day.
If you’d like to go further back, just edit the date range as seen in Twitter’s search field. You could also add a search term, if there’s something specific that you have in mind.
If this ease to find your old tweets makes you nervous, here’s how to delete all of your tweets immediately. You’re welcome.
Twayback Machine is a good tool to start with, but TwimeMachine kicks things up a notch by giving you a plain text page with the user’s tweets to search with CTL-F or otherwise explore. Just head to the site, log in and you’ll be presented with a list of your recent tweets. Wait and more will load.
Sadly, there’s a cap to this tool: “Twitter has a limit of providing only 3200 tweets”, the site explains. So how far you can go back with this tool depends on how prolific a tweeter they are. That’s disappointing, but if you want a powerful tool for quickly digging up tweets, it’s worth a look.
We briefly mentioned this one while explaining how nothing gets deleted from the Internet, ever, but I think it belongs here. Have you ever, while browsing Reddit, seen a deleted post – and a bunch of extreme reactions to that deleted post? Makes you curious, right?
Well, Uneddit is a little bookmarklet you can use to satisfy that curiosity. Just click it and the deleted post will be restored, thanks to an ongoing archiving effort.
Even if you use Reddit like an old pro, you probably have a hard time finding back posts you loved – and Reddit’s built-in search never helps. Reddit Archive lets you scroll back in time to see yesterday’s front page, and you can keep going to explore more.
If you’re looking for that insanely popular post from a few days ago, this is going to be helpful. There’s no interface-driven way to browse to a specific date, but I found that changing the URL manually works well. Or, if you’re looking for something further specific, there’s also a primitive search function, if you’ve got a particular article in mind.
And finally, here’s an app you can use to explore your personal history on an ongoing basis. Timehop is a simple app that shows you things you’ve posted on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr on this day one, two, three, or more years ago.
Any photos on your camera are also included, so anyone who takes pictures regularly and posts to any support social network should get a blast from the past every time they open the app. If you want an easy way for a quick memory, this app is well worth installing.
There you have it: five tools for browsing your past on social networks.
I want to know: what did you find?
Share your favorite things in the comments below, or just let me know about any awesome tools for digging through social networks in the comments below. I’m looking forward to learning more with you.
Image Credits:Shovel by Volcko Mar via Shutterstock
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