How to get your old Facebook statuses

Facebook wants to be the centre of your digital life. On it you can share your photos, videos, and what’s on your mind. But is this sharing ephemeral, like conversation at a party, or is it permanent, like a scrapbook?

In fact, when I log in, it’s easy to see my photos and videos. Beneath my profile picture I see links to “View Photos of Me” and “View Videos of Me”. The central column has a “Photos” tab. If I follow the latter link I can see all my photos grouped into albums, inside which they are divided into pages. I can quickly find photos I uploaded three years ago. But what about what I’ve written?

"What's on your mind?" Facebook now puts this question at its heart, a la Twitter. It's easy to tap out one moody word or a paragraph of political opinion. Sometimes it might be nice to go back and relive the past through these words.

Attributes of Archives

To serve as an archive, Facebook first needs to retain all user-generated content. Thanks to the classmate who this week pointed out that Facebook does keep all your old posts! (Please leave a comment and claim your credit!)

Facebook then needs to make user content both findable and addressable. Findable means that you are easily able to find something, either through navigation or search. Photos on Facebook are easily found through navigation. Addressable means that you are easily able to link to something, so it can be referred to elsewhere (e.g. email, bookmarks, a newer status). Photos on Facebook all have their own page with their own URL.

If you click the timestamp of a Facebook status on the Wall, you will be taken to an archive page for that status, with a URL of its own, also called a permalink.

New statuses have their own URL too. But the real test for text isn’t what you’ve just posted, it’s the old stuff, the classics, so I decided to find some the hard way and then see if I could find it the easy way. I scrolled to the bottom of the Wall; I clicked “Older Posts”; I repeated this process until there were no older posts — I could see the post that said “David joined Facebook”. This process is actually pretty fast thanks to Facebook’s responsive servers, though admittedly I am a light poster.

And here is my first status update:

It turns out that Facebook organises its data differently after early 2008. Before then, statuses do not have a permalink.

New statuses are addressable, old statuses are not. If you got on Facebook in 2008 or later, this isn’t a problem.

See What Facebook Stores

I confirmed that identifiers are not generated for old posts by peeking at the raw data. You can too by following these steps:

1. Login to Facebook
2. Go to Facebook Developers User API
3. Click on the feed link in the Connections table
4. Browser will load a “page” that is a Javascript data structure containing your latest Wall posts
5. To see more posts, append &limit=250 to your URL

You’ll see that newer posts have an id like 123456789_123456789012345 (where the first part is your Facebook user id), which is used for the permalink, but older posts have no such attribute.

(Thanks to Lipsis for pointing me in the right direction.)

(Note that the web is littered with methods for accessing Facebook’s back end that no longer work, because Facebook periodically changes its API. The same fate may befall my process.)

Statuses Can’t Be Found

Unfortunately the situation for findability is worse.

There are no pages where you can browse your archives by date a la WordPress’s daily, monthly, and yearly archives.

There is a search function — which is probably a surprise to most users. The search box at the top of the screen doesn’t just find users or pages, as its aggressively dynamic results suggest.

At the bottom of the dynamic drop-down list there is an entry for "See More Results". Click this to be taken to a search results page.

The search results page shows Users, Pages, Post by Friends, and Web Results (supplied by Bing). You can then select a link to “View All Posts By Friends”. Unfortunately this won’t return anything more recent than “about a week ago”.

(Is there a Law of Web 2.0 Conservation? Google can’t do social networking and Facebook can’t do search?)

Facebook Is Not A Good Archive

Your writing on Facebook is mostly addressable, but isn’t findable. Rather than a scrapbook you keep on the shelf, it’s more like the diary that you lose somewhere in the roof.

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no reason why Facebook can’t generate identifiers for all your old posts, and even less reason that Facebook can’t introduce a decent search function. It makes sense that it will do so at some point in the future. After all, the more you have invested in Facebook, the stickier it becomes. Even the most random status can turn out to have value, and Facebook, as a business, must capitalise on everything it can.

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