Incomplete Twitter Timeline
November 15, 2019 3:25 PM Subscribe
I'm trying to find a recent tweet (4 hrs ago) by loading the author's timeline and searching down the page for text string via web browser find. It doesn't appear. This happens a lot. Does Twitter not show the complete timeline, even for recent tweets?
1. The tweet shows in retweets (so he didn't delete).
2. I've configured to "latest tweets show as they happen"
3. I've loaded his timeline's "Tweets & Replies" pane.
4. I let a sufficient backlog of tweets load in the page
5. Advanced search (specifying test string and his account name) DOES find the tweets.
1. The tweet shows in retweets (so he didn't delete).
2. I've configured to "latest tweets show as they happen"
3. I've loaded his timeline's "Tweets & Replies" pane.
4. I let a sufficient backlog of tweets load in the page
5. Advanced search (specifying test string and his account name) DOES find the tweets.
Best answer: As you scroll down the page to load more tweets, Twitter will automatically unload tweets from the top of the timeline. It does this to prevent the browser from slowing down from having too many tweets loaded at once. They're still cached so it can almost instantly re-display them if you scroll back up, but they are no longer part of the page that the browser sees.
So you can never get all of the tweets loaded onto the page and searchable at the same time.
You can see this if you open a profile page like SPLBuzz. The top tweet right now has the word "Panther" and it will show up if you do a Find-In-Page while at the top of the timeline, but if you scroll down several pages and try again, it will no longer find that word.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:13 PM on November 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
So you can never get all of the tweets loaded onto the page and searchable at the same time.
You can see this if you open a profile page like SPLBuzz. The top tweet right now has the word "Panther" and it will show up if you do a Find-In-Page while at the top of the timeline, but if you scroll down several pages and try again, it will no longer find that word.
posted by mbrubeck at 4:13 PM on November 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Yeah the only other way to do this besides advanced search is AllMyTweets which, after you authenticate, can be used, iirc, to load all of anyone's tweets. Can be useful if you need a tweet from a few days back but don't know the exact thing to CTRL-F for.
posted by jessamyn at 7:13 PM on November 15, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by jessamyn at 7:13 PM on November 15, 2019 [5 favorites]
Response by poster: Best densest AskMeFi thread ever!
posted by Quisp Lover at 7:46 PM on November 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Quisp Lover at 7:46 PM on November 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
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posted by Quisp Lover at 3:26 PM on November 15, 2019