Twistory

» see twistory.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Twistory went into private beta on 26 April 2008 at a Belgian event called MobileWebCamp. TechCrunch wrote it up the same day and was careful to describe it as a tool Tijs Vrolix had built to show off his coding and design skills, which at the time was an accurate description of how most of the Twitter ecosystem started. Vrolix worked with Pixelpanic, a small interactive agency in Neerpelt, a town near the Dutch border with about fifteen thousand people in it.

The function was a single sentence long. You gave Twistory a Twitter username and it handed back an iCalendar feed. Subscribe to that feed in iCal or Google Calendar, and every tweet from that account appeared in your calendar at the day and the hour it was posted. Your own account, somebody else's, it did not care. TechCrunch's reviewer was openly unsure whether this was useful and noted it was certainly useful for closely monitoring somebody.

It turned out to be useful in a way nobody led with: a calendar is the only interface most people own that is organized by when. Reading your own year as a calendar rather than as a reverse-chronological wall changes what you notice. You see the empty weeks. You see the day you would not shut up.

~ the record ~

~ a dollar a month ~

By February 2011 Twistory had more than 40,000 users and Vrolix rebuilt it for speed. The rebuild came with a Pro tier at a dollar a month, and what a dollar bought was an export: your entire Twitter backlog as a CSV file. Vrolix said that was the most requested feature there had ever been.

Read that again slowly. The thing people most wanted, enough to pay a subscription for it, was a copy of the things they themselves had written. Twitter did not give you one. A guy in Neerpelt did, for a dollar, and even then he could only hand over 3,200 of your tweets, because 3,200 was the hard limit Twitter's API put on how far back any application was allowed to look. The man selling you your own archive was rationed on how much of it he could reach.

~ the cull ~

In the second half of 2012 Twitter rewrote its API and the new rules were not aimed at tools like this so much as indifferent to them. Version 1.1 brought hard per-endpoint rate limits, mandatory authentication on calls that had been open, display requirements for anything showing a tweet, and a cap on how many user tokens a third-party client could hold. Any of those alone is survivable for a one-person project. The combination is a full-time job.

Vrolix announced on 18 October 2012. "Hate to announce that we killed Twistory," he wrote, and told The Next Web the decision was highly unpleasant. He gave two reasons: the tightening of the API rules, and the fact that the people behind it were busy with other things by then. About 60,000 people had used it across the free and paid tiers.

Anyone who has built on top of somebody else's platform recognizes this shape. To the company that owns the API you are a rounding error in a policy document, and the policy changes for reasons that have nothing to do with you. 2012 was the year the Twitter ecosystem found this out all at once, and the tools that died that year were mostly small and mostly free.

~ the last five weeks ~

The wind-down was gentle for something that had been killed. New signups stopped on 7 November 2012. Paying subscribers were taken off billing immediately and given several months to pull their CSV down. A notice page went up on checkthis.com within days of the announcement, which is where the record of the closing date comes from.

The archive brackets it. twistory.net was still serving its homepage on 27 November 2012, unchanged from three weeks earlier, and by 6 December the domain answered with a redirect and nothing else. 3 December 2012 sits inside that window, which is the date this grave uses.

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