On Facebook and Twitter you can read posts, minipost and real-time updates every day, regarding what friends are doing, the news of the day, links, photos and so on. Both on Facebook and on Twitter, however, it is difficult to look for old posts and status updates, published perhaps 6 months ago, by a specific friend or concerning a topic or a word.
On Twitter, the Tweet search engine finds messages no older than 10 days ago.
On Facebook, on the other hand, you can scroll down a friend's bulletin board to find what he wrote a year ago or you can search for a word among the status updates from the homepage but you cannot search on the fly if and when a friend had wrote that thing.
Various applications can be used to search for old Facebook posts and past Twitter tweets .
READ ALSO: See what you were doing today, past years, on Facebook
1) To search for old Facebook posts from your personal profile, you must press the Diary button under the cover and then select the grid view .
With this type of view you can scroll down quickly and find all the old posts that we have published.
It's also easy to delete all posts quickly from this view.
Another way to search for older Facebook posts is to use the Activity Log, whose button is on the profile page.
2) Social Searcher is a web service that makes it easy to search for both Facebook posts and Twitter tweets.
It is a search engine that, by connecting to your account on one or the other social netowork, allows you to search by keywords, words used in messages and status updates.
You can search for your own updates or for updates from one of your friends.
To search for old Facebook messages, type in your name or that of one of your friends by selecting it from the drop-down menu.
Obviously you must give authorization to the Social Search application to access the data of your Facebook account.
All messages with matching words will be listed in a list.
3) You can also search for Facebook posts and friends' status updates, effectively using the internal search engine as explained in the related guide.
4) Topsy (no longer exists) is instead ideal for looking for old tweets on Twitter .
Just search, for example, from: pomhey to see all the past tweets of pomhey (which is me) or from: username to see those of any other account.
To search for the first written tweet you can sort the list by date and find it easily.
My first tweet from 5 years ago was simply www.navigaweb.net
5) A search engine for old Facebook posts, for friends and for yourself, the ArchivedBook application is much better (no longer exists)
ArchivedBook, after authorizing the connection, draws up the list of friends and allows you to view and read all the posts written on their bulletin board since they opened the account (or rather from 2009) until today.
Archivedbook presents a history of messages on the bulletin board with all the posts and status updates of whoever is on the friends list, in chronological order.
For posts from 2011, ArchivedBook also allows you to navigate to the original message by clicking on the permalink and also shows how many comments that post had received and how many I like.
6) For Facebook, remember that you can download the history of your account and all FAcebook data
7) For Twitter, on the other hand, the best past tweet search engine is SnapBird, a Twitter application to search for past posts and private messages older than 2 weeks (that the standard Twitter search does not work)
The search can be done by looking only at the tweets of the accounts that follow or the entire network of twittering worldwide.
If you want to search on Twitter in global and also in real time you can use the Twazzup site.
8) AllMyTweets is a very similar site that lists the tweets passed on a page for each user account.
9) Since 2013 all the tweets published on Twitter can be downloaded for members of the social network.
This means that those who want can now go to the Settings of the account section and activate the " Request your archive " function to download the tweets on their computer.
After activation you will receive an Email message with the link to download the entire Tweet archive, in Zip format.
Once downloaded the past messages and also the retweets, you can view them by ordering them by month, or search for them using a search key, phrases, names with the scroll or hashtags.
10) Also for Twitter there is also a Windows program called Tweet Nest (a beta program that is not easy to install) that does an analysis of the account and shows all the messages written by you and your friends, with graphs and statistics.
