I was stunned to learn, via Danny, that our collective tweets seem lost to eternity (or at least, to search). While the data exists, tweets can’t be found via search, which means they can’t be found via the search API, which means…well, they can’t be found. I hope this situation is rectified, if only for history’s sake.
(Danny notes that they can be found using Google or Bing, at least for now. That’s a relief. But it does not bode well for Twitter’s ability to scale.)
The tweets are lost event if they are found.
From what I understand tweet contant is not in a semantic form that would allow developers to easliy create thrid party apps that would be able to “Understand” and add “Context” to a tweet
You can not find the database?
I can’t say I’m shocked. I’ve been saying for months that Twitter bought a lemon when it made Summize the official Twitter search engine.
Summize was a a dumb-keyword search (no clustering, ranking, or spam-filtering) engine that looked cool because it was searching something “cool.” I’m not the least bit surprised that the database backend is too primitive to keep up with Twitter’s growth. They probably don’t have any really skilled databse people working on search over there.