Cleaning Out the Twitter Closet

Remember how I deleted my Twitter archive last month, and how some bits and bobs got left over in the process?

Well William Denton followed my archive-deleting lead, and took another approach, using a versatile Ruby script called t.

I decided to see whether that approach might work for me.

After installing it on my Mac, and following the helpful instructions for getting the script authorized with Twitter, I dumped my timeline:

# t timeline ruk --csv
ID,Posted at,Screen name,Text
319800553192443906,2013-04-04 13:16:08 +0000,ruk,RT @David: Great to see @audible_com join @SoundCloud to promote notable audiobooks https://t.co/bQvEtwK59U
301710262195593216,2013-02-13 15:11:46 +0000,ruk,"RT @David: Welcome to SoundCloud, @thisamerlife https://t.co/4VC5CtqP"
281742627559313408,2012-12-20 12:47:31 +0000,ruk,RT @David: Still very proud of @manolo for this achievement: getting The @WhiteHouse and @BarackObama onto SoundCloud http://t.co/z6HzfssG
144025169202122752,2011-12-06 12:07:30 +0000,ruk,RT @David: Nuce! RT @carhartl: O hai. Unstealthing. http://t.co/1GW3j3xg
103009050316390401,2011-08-15 07:44:06 +0000,ruk,RT @David: Great Sunday morning find on @SoundCloud: this Americana group: http://t.co/tV9CCuC
1017653,2006-12-12 19:55:11 +0000,ruk,Heading home for the day.

And then tried deleting one of those retweets:

# delete status 319800553192443906
Are you sure you want to permanently delete @ruk's status: "RT @David: Great to see @audible_com join @SoundCloud to promote notable audiobooks https://t.co/bQvEtwK59U"? [y/N] y
@ruk deleted the Tweet: "RT @David: Great to see @audible_com join @SoundCloud to promote notable audiobooks https://t.co/bQvEtwK59U"

Sure enough it worked! I repeated for all the others, excepting ye olde first tweet. Which is all that’s left now:

# t timeline ruk --csv
ID,Posted at,Screen name,Text
1017653,2006-12-12 19:55:11 +0000,ruk,Heading home for the day.

What I could not accomplish using Twitter’s website, I was able to do through this side door. And so all you’ll find on my profile page is that single original “hello world”:

Twitter’s counters are still off–I don’t have 24 tweets in my timeline, I have one, and I deleted all my “likes”–but at least my timeline is barren.