The default twitter icon is an egg. There are six available. One is chosen at random for each new user.

Hex colors for the six icons:

1. #e95f28
2. #4a913c
3. #ffac33
4. #8899a6
5. #744eaa
6. #be1931

Large versions of those icons:

(Output)

I wanted to archive twitter so that I could

1. Make sure old content was easily available
2. Read twitter in a one-per-line format without ever logging into the site

twitter_ebooks is a framework to make twitter bots, but it includes an ‘archive’ component to fetch historical account content which is apparently unique in that it 1) works with current TLS and 2) works the current twitter API. It stores the tweets in a JSON format which presumably matches the API return values. Usage is simple:

while read account
do
    ebooks archive "${account}" "archive/${account}.json"
    jq -r 'reverse | .\[\] | "\\(.created\_at|@sh)\\t \\(.text|@sh)"' "archive/${account}.json" >"archive/${account}.txt"
done 

I ran into a bug with upstream incompatibilities which is easily fixed. Another caveat is that the twitter API only allows access 3200 tweets back in time for an account–all the more reason to set up archiving ASAP. Twitter’s rate-limiting is also extreme (15-180 req/15 min), and I’m worried about a problem where my naive script can’t make it through a list of more than 15 accounts even with no updates.