If you’re curious about what you tweeted six months ago, or what your first tweet ever was, you’ll be disappointed if you try to search for it on Twitter.com. Twitter doesn’t let you view your tweets older than about ten days, and even less if you are a prolific tweeter. However, there are some services out there that will let you view your old tweets, and even download them to save them for posterity.

Snap Bird

Snap Bird is a powerful way to search through tweet history. You can use it to view your old tweets dating as far back as the day you started using Twitter. You simply enter your Twitter username in the search box and leave the search term blank to get Snap Bird to pull up all of your old tweets. You’ll get a list of 200 tweets to start, and you can continue to go back by 200 tweets at a time.

Not only can you look at your old tweets using Snap Bird, but you can also search for people’s favorites, your friends’ tweets, tweets that mention you, and your sent and received direct messages.

TwimeMachine

This is one of the simpler ways to read your old tweets. If you sign in with Twitter, TwimeMchine will pull your older tweets into a single web page for you, starting with the most recent and displaying them in reverse chronological order. TwimeMachine doesn’t do much other than this, and it is restricted to 3,200 tweets as per Twitter’s restricted API access given to all developers. However, it is a fantastic way to quickly view all of your old tweets in one place.

Tweet Scan

Tweet Scan will show you all of your tweets as far back as December 2007. You can choose whether to view just your old tweets, or include and one or more of the following: @replies, your friends’ tweets, your followers’ tweets, direct messages, or favorite tweets. Your tweets are presented in a “TiddlyWiki” format, which means you can make notes and edit the pages. This service is great for an at-a-glance view of your older tweets, or if you want to review your tweet strategy in more detail.