social-twitter
Wayback Tweets (claromes)
A tool that queries the Wayback Machine's capture index to list every archived tweet for a given handle. It draws on the same underlying Wayback capture data, scoped to one account at a time. Reach for it to enumerate a user's surviving archived tweets, though the hosted app itself often sleeps or times out.
Why it’s useful & how it works
Wayback Tweets, built by developer Clarissa Mendes, queries the Wayback Machine's capture index for every archived tweet tied to a single username and presents them in a browsable list. It is the fastest way to take stock of what archived copies exist for a specific account rather than chasing individual tweet URLs one at a time. The hosted web app runs on Streamlit and can be slow to wake up, but the underlying data it draws on is the same Wayback capture index and is always available. Echo links you directly to the app so you can type in the handle you need.
What’s inside
Coverage is bounded entirely by what the Wayback Machine has crawled for that account. There is no independent archive; results vary from a handful of captures to thousands depending on how often the account was crawled.
API access
wraps Wayback CDX: http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=twitter.com/ <user>/status/*&output=json
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Unreachable 11.2 s (fetch failed: redirect count exceeded)
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Unreachable 8.2 s (fetch failed: redirect count exceeded)
- API, direct
- Timed out 15.8 s (This operation was aborted)
- API, through a proxy
- Responded HTTP 200 14.9 s
- API CDX, direct
- Responded HTTP 200 8 s
- API CDX, through a proxy
- Responded HTTP 200 4.5 s
Did a real search return anything?
Returned results · 21 results for the sample query · median 13.2 s · stable across runs
Slow: budget for long waits, or call it asynchronously.
CDX is slow (17-25s); use the Availability API for existence checks, CDX only for full capture lists.
Benchmark coverage
Found 1 of 1 test items (100%) in the Social cluster. Median response 9.6 s.
By how well known the item is: 1/1 well-known .
Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Search checked 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.
Access
Programmatic API access (a key may be required, see the API tag).