Dear Twitter- I’ll Give Back SO Much Space

You are right..

But this isn't the only "problem" Twitter could solve:
- retweet-option
- option to delete tweets isn't always there
- possibility to see the original tweet one has replied to (especially for a power user like yourself this could prove useful)
- ...

Which functions would you like to see?

http://twitter.com/Adgenius/

LOL. So true.

With arguments like this I guess they have to listen.

On the other hand they turned down a $500,000,000,000 offer, so money isn't going to be an issue.

Same here, not quite 15,000 but an awful lot.

@Dennis: that 500 million was based on an awfully wrong valuation of Facebook, I'm guessing those at Facebook know that too, so it was actually only like a 50 million offer. Still a lot of money though, but it would be paid out in Facebook stock, and I wouldn't go for that in these times either :)

Great post Chris!

Yesterday I had well over 100 direct messages, and although it's a little easier to delete them using Tweet Deck, it's still way to hard on Twitter.

Come on guys, Chris makes a great point here. Let us give you some space back.

THANKS CHRIS:
As today is Thanks Giving on your side of the pond, I would like to 'give thanks' to YOU Chris. I love your blog and value your insights!

There are so many tweaks they could make, that would improve life for twitterers, although it's still a great service. My main gripe is that we can create these mock sidebars with our background images but not make them clickable...

Chris, you should check out DM-Deleter to get rid of those Direct Messages: http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm-deleter/

I wouldn't say that your direct messages take up that much diskspace.

If we figure each msg has a max length of 160 characters than thats 160 Bytes per msg, then we figure all the other details of a msg ie person who sent it, time it was sent, equals 40 Bytes. We have (160 + 40)200 Bytes per msg.

Multiply that by 15536 equals 3,107,200 Bytes, or 2.96 MegaBytes.

I could write you a Perl script, if you want, that could delete 70 msg an hour, so assuming you don't get any more direct msgs that would take 9 days.

Hi Chris enjoying the blog and the healthy debate on Social media and twitter use. My DMs are now deleted. Just showing you some thanksgiving love, keep right on twittering.

yep chris - i've written about this before too - at a minimum they could easily add a "check all" per page - this one by one is crap - i too have 1000+ dm's which i wish would go away!

Very true. And yet another reason why I dislike DMs altogether. Email is better anyway. Twitter is for public messaging, not DMs. But, hey, that's just me.

Hi Chris

Well if you've got 15500 direct messages just sitting there then I'm guessing it'll be unlikely you'll see mine. So instead I thought I'd just post a comment here to say we follow each other on Twitter so we'd like to check you're aware your site is mobilized by Mippin?

www.mippin.com/web/getMippin.jsp?id=3947

You could customise / brand / insert advertising / promote it too, but reckon you'll need all your spare time to deal with 15500 direct messages. Feel free to post one to us though - I deleted our last 15500 last week ;)

I agree with the occasional lack of a trash basket. That's annoying. I also agree with Chris' original post here. It's the same gripe I've had since I started using Twitter.

Another thing I'd like to see is "newer / older" links at the top of the timeline. The ones at the bottom are handy, but having the same thing at the top would go a long way, especially when reading three or four pages of tweets.

Would also like an option to choose whether we see 10, 20, 30, or 50 (or whatever) tweets per page!

I don't think we should have to rely on outside scripts to get Twitter to do what we want or need it to do.

http://twitter.com/mariadkins

OK I'll say it. 25,000 UPDATES!!!!

Chris, you may be one of the first official cases of
'acute twitteritis'

Put down your iphone and seek immediate medical help.

http://twitter.com/ninjachad

LOL - you think 15K 140 character messages is even a blip of space? That's bunny rabbits!

Speaking of direct messages, is there a way to keyword search all of my direct messages, without going to twitter.com and hitting the previous button a gazillion times?

So if you, one of the more prolific Twitter users has around 15k messages and that adds up to about 3MB, then understand that on some really mediocre storage of 1TB, twitter can store that much for 300k prolific users. Mind you, this assumes that every prolific user spits out a message that is chock full at 160 chars. None of this takes into account the overhead of packing it into mySQL or other database.

I think users such as yourself are using less space than you think and I'd guess you can fit closer to 1M users in there. Since you're somewhere special on the bell curve, you can be sure that you're not representative of the average Twitter user, and the average user is taking up less than 10% of that space. Many have abandoned accounts or under utilize their accounts as we perceive it.

Seeing as how I as a home user (not an average one) have a server with a hardware-RAID mirrored 1TB array, I assume that a venture like Twitter has at least 5TB at their disposal and that this is not a problem for them. As storage prices continue to fall, you can be sure their storage will have grown while they now have to consider geographically diversifying their infrastructure to allow for quicker access times from around the globe, and a little redundancy in case of "events" like we see today in India.

Wow that puts my 159 direct messages into perspective.I agree it would be a great idea to put such an option in.

Delete them but stop talking about the recession.

Yes i agree with you chris lack of trashcan is something twitter needs to look into.

And i do agree @mari an option to choose 10, 20, 30, or 50 (or whatever) tweets per page! is also something Twitter need to look into

http://twitter.com/krishnat

I agree with Rob. The delete twit needs fixed. Id like to see groups without the need for tweetdeck.

http://www.twitter.com/dunkjmcd

I agree with Phillip.
Does it cost more for a disk spindle to spin while being 60% full or 1% full?

The answer may surprise you. It's the same damn thing!!

I thought I was the only one wondering why they didn't have this option. Thanks for posting this Chris. Hopefully something gets done about it :)

Agreed... along with Favorites. I tend to use Favorites as a bookmark these days, to capture a tweet so that I can get a URL when no on my machine. Once I get to my computer, I bookmark and then delete...but often it is a few at a time or on a "hot topic" period not always done, and they stack up.

Also what's with the 2000 limit. Please, sometimes you find a few groups and things grow. Deleting 20 to make room for new ones is a royal pain, groups, sections all of this should be easier to do.

Someone crafty will turn this to our advantage, and utilize this as a free backup storage medium, ala gmail.

Wow, you are soooooo right. And how do you delet the @ messages once you've read them?

I guess I fail to see the real problem here. I've never had to delete a single DM. Granted, I only have a couple of hundred, but I don't need to delete any. They're just "there," and to me that's the nature of the modern Internet: not needing to delete anything.

I agree with those who have complained about the ever-vanishing trash can; I would like to see it around all of the time for those instances of typos or accidentally hitting enter instead of the space bar.

I guess I fail to see the real problem here. I've never had to delete a single DM. Granted, I only have a couple of hundred, but I don't need to delete any. They're just "there," and to me that's the nature of the modern Internet: not needing to delete anything.

I agree with those who have complained about the ever-vanishing trash can; I would like to see it around all of the time for those instances of typos or accidentally hitting enter instead of the shift key.

Now I feel like a really bad friend for not having previously directed you to @dacort's amazing DM whacker.

http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm-deleter/

I can't live w/o it. I've used it for awhile now. Every time my DMs get above 1k I use it. I mean, after all, I have the important ones archived in my GMail. :)

Sorry I didn't tell you sooner!!

p.s. @dacort does the most useful scripts!! :)

For those of you they may have tried to use my DM Deleter (http://dcortesi.com/tools/dm_deleter/), I just updated it today to make it compatible with some changes Twitter recently made.

It's a brute-force way of doing it, but it does allow you to clear out your DM's at the expense of Twitter's databases...

Cool while your at it please inform the Twitter peeps to get a handle on viewing mutual followers. People get all crazy over that. Thanks Chris. ;)

http://twitter.com/jpearce01