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01/22/2013 02:53 pm ET

Twitter Archive Roll Out Continues: What Will You Find In Your Old Tweets? Here's What I Found

By Craig Kanalley

Many now have access to their "Twitter Archives" - every tweet you ever posted to the social network.

If you're not sure, you can look for it by going to the settings in your account. If you scroll to the bottom, you should be able to request access to your Twitter Archives. Minutes later, you'll get an email with instructions to pulling up your archives.

Twitter introduced the archive feature with a blog post on Dec. 19, when it said it would roll it out in "the coming weeks and months." I reached out to Twitter and there's no update on the timeline besides what was said then. But if you don't have it yet, it should be fairly soon; I just got access last week.

The rationality behind the Twitter Archive: "We know lots of you would like to explore your Twitter past," Twitter explained. "Maybe you wanted to recall your reaction to the 2008 election, reminisce on what you said to your partner on your 10th anniversary, or just see your first few Tweets."

Tweets are typically accessible for days only through Twitter Search. To find old tweets prior to that, you can try sites like Topsy. But even then, especially for those who tweet a lot, you can only go back so far.

Twitter, of course, has every tweet ever stored in its databases. And allowing you to access all of your past tweets is what the Twitter Archive is all about.

What will you find in your archive?

ViralHeat compiled a nice list of five things you should expect when you pull up your archives, including the fact you may feel tempted to delete old tweets.

The Wall Street Journal's Director of Social Media & Engagement Liz Heron observed, "Finally got my Twitter archive! 2008 was... I didn't know how to use it."

Joe Webster of SmartBrief created a Storify to share some of his findings, including the prescient 2008 posting, "wondering if AP alerts would work on twitter."

Here were some of my findings.

My first tweet ever. (Is it weird I remember what I was eating here? Chicken fingers. True story.) Quickly followed up by this second tweet. I often posted about food when I first started using Twitter. My first @ reply was about food. I would frequently inform my 10 followers where I was at any given time. As if they cared. I tweeted about sports. I shared post-game analysis. There were historic moments like this in my first month of using Twitter. I often tweeted (and still do) about my hometown of Buffalo, New York. My first Buffalo-related tweet was about our hockey team, the Sabres, in September 2008. My first retweet ever was a "3RT" in November 2008. Clearly, I didn't know what I was doing: My first tweet with LOL in it: I started a blog about Twitter and news. I would geek out about analytics and share them. I would shamelessly promote the blog. I posted my first "FollowFriday" in July 2009. One of them, @mathewi, remains one of my favorite follows.

Eventually, my blog led to my first full-time job. I announced the new job in a tweet.

I documented moving to NYC. Here I tweet about finding an apartment. (I still live there.)

I would meet people in real life after getting to know each other on Twitter (made a list of such people). And I would tweet about it.

In time, I crafted a Twitter style I still use today - sharing news nuggets like this.

I met my girlfriend through Twitter. We followed each other for a while, then met in real life. Her first tweet to me was on March 12, 2012 at 6:27 p.m. ET:

@ckanal Thanks for the follow back! I hope that by the Buffalo + Hockey you're a @BuffaloSabres fan? #LetsGoBuffalo

I wrote back to her one minute later:

Glad to connect. Huge #Sabres fan! Big game tonight. #LetsGoBuffalo @BuffaloSabres

The Sabres won that night over Montreal 3-2 in overtime.

In October 2012, I tweeted more than any other month to date due to Hurricane Sandy. I never lost power (lucky) and tweeted real-time developments and ways to help others.

So those are 25 old tweets of mine that I found interesting in some way. It's fun to take a trip down memory lane. You should be able to also once you have your Twitter Archive.

Craig Kanalley Senior Editor, Big News & Live Events, The Huffington Post

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Twitter Archive Roll Out Continues: What Will You Find In Your Old Tweets? Here's What I Found

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