Few days ago, someone advertised how successfully they archived Twitter account
here.
update april 10th, 2013: the above archived Twitter account seems to be deleted. Why? Who knows…
At first glance, everything seems OK.
Hmmm … lets have a deeper look (click the image):
First, the date on the URL address bar (20100520091305 read 2010 05 20… a timestamp used internally by the archive server and that should point to a snapshot of the tweets done around the 20th May 2010) doesn’t match the one in the tweet (Fri Oct 12 2012 10:01).
Second, whatever the archiving date you select, all the archived tweets are returned.
Finally, the last tweet is supposed to be the one of Sep 13 2012 (click the first image), but the result set returned tweets that occurred after that date (eg. Fri Oct 12 2012 10:01).
A non experienced user can easily miss these.
Learned lesson: don’t use/abuse the same (old) tools to archive new web medias, especially social ones.