My first ten tweets were particularly idiotic

“But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.” Matthew 12:36

I always think of that verse when I look at the number of times I’ve tweeted. Really? Every idle word? Man.

I recently learned (thanks to Tom) that Twitter now enables you to download an archive of all your tweets. I did so–all 23,201 of them. They come in a tidy HTML archive, as well as a CSV files for every month of tweets. To my dismay, these were my first tweets–the earliest is at the bottom:

I can’t even remember what the project was. It was evidently a wise choice to shelve it.

We are always fascinated by data about ourselves (consider LinkedIn’s recent clever email campaign congratulating users on being in the top 1, 5 or 10% of most-viewed profiles). So, I concatenated all 72 CSV files into one big spreadsheet, and produced an old-school tag cloud. Click to embiggen:

What conclusions can I draw from this?

• I’m pretty sure that 95% of the ‘likes’ have nothing to do with Facebook. Do I have the written voice of a teenage girl?
• My writing is way more informal on Twitter–look at all those instances of ‘heh’, ‘ah’ and ‘oh’ (insert dirty joke here).
• Why is ‘Google’ so prominent? I have no idea.
• I’m pretty sure most of the instances of ‘Thanks’ are me citing a source.
• It’s interesting to see who I’ve tweeted at most.

Those are all fairly banal, but I suppose our own data is like our own dreams–fascinating to us, and boring to everybody else.

It’s a small pity that Twitter doesn’t include any data for number of favourites and retweets. I’d be curious what my most retweeted tweet was.