Twitter – How to retrieve complete chat from a Twitter chat

I would say yes you do receive them all.

Certain replies unless you follow both users are not able to be seen.

Cases for replies and mentions :

1. Your account is protected mentions sent to people who aren't following you will not be seen.
2. You will only see replies in your home time line if you are following both the sender and recipient of the tweet
3. You will see mentions not replies in your timeline as long as you are following the sender

Even during the heaviest traffic times in World Cup I was able to see all the user tweets. The home timeline only receives 20 tweets without the refresh using the more button or the "N new tweets" message. That way it might seem to someone that they are not receiving all the tweets.

For example if X users > 20 posted at 2:30 pm during a World Cup game , it would appear to you that person Y's tweet is missing. It is there , it is just that the timeline only displays 20.

To verify this , you can test with the following tabs open on your browser.

• http://twitter.com/home
• http://snapbird.org/ (Search your friends' tweets and blank for the search term)
• http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/home_timeline.xml (Inspect in web developer mode using your firefox or chrome browser)

Looking at these three will tell you that you are in fact getting all your tweets.

Edit

If you inspect a user's timeline and are sure that it does not match up with the three above then I would suggest to check http://status.twitter.com/ to see the current status of any errors that are occurring site-wide.

If you think it is more localized you can submit a Twicket : http://help.twitter.com/requests/new

Think your Twicket is taking too long shoot a mention to @delbius the lead on Twitter's Trust and Safety team.

I'm not sure it's possible to get ALL tweets without providing a search term. That would be a hell of a lot of data - even just for this year.

There are a list of services here however all them require you to provide a search term.

Your best bet may be Archivist as they actually allow you to download the source code of the site. You may be able to customise this to do what you want.

If all that fails, your only other option would be to contact Twitter directly and see if they can provide you with a years worth of data. I wouldn't hold out much hope for that though!

Good luck!