Access to historic tweets using REST API for acadamic research

[jjwniemzok]

Hi all,

For research purpose I am currently trying building an application to extract historic tweets from a sample of a few thousand users. I am interested in tweets between 2006 and 2010. I figured that GET/statuses/User_timeline only gives me latest 3200 status updates (is it possible to get extended right here?). But due to this blog post I hoped to get access via search/API but it is apparently limited to last 6-9 days. Can anybody help?

[andypiper]

That’s correct, the public Search API is (and always has been) limited to a 6-9 day window and is not guaranteed to be a complete index. The timelines only return a maximum of 3200 Tweets and there’s no way to increase that.

For a longer timescale, we’d recommend Gnip, which is our paid product for access to the whole Twitter archive. We also have a limited Data Grants program for researchers, but that is currently closed to applications.