Frequently Asked Questions

What's The Archivist?

The Archivist is a service that lets you search Twitter for Tweets. Then you can create an archive, analyze, export and share the tweets. The Archivist is brought to you by Microsoft's MIX Online team.

How do I start archiving Tweets?

Simply sign in to Twitter and associate your account with The Archivist; then, you can save an archive and we'll start monitoring Twitter for you. You can choose to keep that search private. Or, you can share your results with friends, colleagues or the world, too.

How often are archives and visualizations updated?

Archives and visualizations are updated at different intervals depending on how active the archive is. See this lab note for a further discussion of the topic.

How do I share my archives with friends and colleagues?

Just make sure your archive is set to "Public" and then share the url of that page—just like sharing any other page.

The only difference between public and private is who can see a particular archive. If you keep your archive private, only you can see your archives—and only when you're logged in. If the archive is marked public, anyone can access that archive.

How do I remove an archive
once I've started it?

Click on the title of the archive you would like to delete. Once viewing that archive, you should see options to open in excel, download, tweet and remove archive in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Click “Remove archive.”

You will be prompted to confirm that you'd like to delete the search from your archives. Click “Yes” and the archive won't appear again (until you search for that term again).

I'm not seeing everything ever Tweeted about a subject? What's wrong?

The Archivist cannot go back in time. So, when you begin an archive, you will only see at most the 500 last tweets about that topic. Once you begin a search, The Archivist will start monitoring that term.

Once you've started an archive, The Archivist will do its best to capture every tweet that matches the criteria for that search. However, The Archivist cannot guarantee that it will capture every single tweet. This is due to how Twitter search works. The Archivist polls Twitter and there is a chance it could miss tweets.

How do I develop off of The Archivist's architecture?

Please visit the Developers' page. It will help you get started building services and applications using The Archivist. Or, if you fancy, you can run your own instance of The Archivist.

Who developed and designed The Archivist?

The nerds at MIX Online. To learn more about how and why we built The Archivist, see this collection of articles and lab notes.

Does The Archivist use the Twitter firehose?

No. The Archivist does not have access to the Twitter firehose. The Archivist polls the Twitter Search API to collect data. As such, there is a chance that the Archivist could miss tweets, especially in the case of a search with a high volume of traffic.

However, for terms with a low volume of traffic (less than 1000 tweets a day) The Archivist will most likely capture all the tweets for that term.

Can I export an archive and get the tweets in the archive?

No. The Twitter Terms of Service does not allow this.