What I was after

Like a lot of people who joined Twitter when it first started picking up steam, I used it for a lot of stupid status updates much in the same way that people used Facebook statuses. It was time to do a purge. But going through your Twitter history and deleting old tweets one at a time is a pain in the neck; surely there must be an easier way…

The result(s)

I stumbled upon Cardigan: a no bullshit tweet purger with a simple mantra, “Cardigan helps you find and delete old tweets.”

The important bits

Basically, with Cardigan, you authorize their web app to access your Twitter account, it imports all of your tweets into their system, and you can go through and multi-select old messages and mass delete them. It really is a no-frills system, so there’s not a lot of room for confusion.

Two notes worth mentioning:

  1. Your old Twitter messages may be deleted from your profile, but they likely still exist in an archive of the web somewhere. This will just help the embarrassing ones to not be so easily and readily available and associated with your profile.
  2. You may want to revoke access to Cardigan in Twitter after you’re done purging to play it safe.

Happy purging.