It depends on how you want to select these tweets. If you need to find tweets based on keywords without knowing the users, then the search API won't go back more than about 7 days, as you say.
If you want tweets from users that you have already identified, you can get up to 3,200 old tweets from a specific user with /statuses/user_timeline: http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/statuses/user_timeline If you don't know the users, but just want a sample of past tweets about a subject, one technique I have used is to track keywords with the search or stream APIs, identify users who tweet regularly about these words, use /statuses/user_timeline to get as many past tweets from each of these users, and collect the tweets that match your search. It isn't the type of thing that you can use for real-time display of historical data, but if you want a large set of old tweets for a subject, it will deliver them if you let it run long enough. On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 12:13 AM, Chris Bang <renob...@gmail.com> wrote: > I’m developing a program to collect historical data or twits from > Twitter using Twitter search API and Twitter4J which means the program > is based on Java. > I selected Search API for my program among APIs by Twitter. However, > Twitter says that there is a limitation of 7days, although the limit > depends on topic. Is there any way to collect older or historical > Twitter data like 12 or 24 months old or without time constraint at > all? If anybody successfully retrieved old Twitter data, can you > please share the source code? > > -- > Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc > API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi > Issues/Enhancements Tracker: > http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list > Change your membership to this group: > http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk > -- Adam Green Twitter API Consultant and Trainer http://140dev.com @140dev -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
