How important is it?

To have those replies? Hmm. Hmmmm

I'm not sure. I'll survive..but it'd be nice to have 'em? I kinda value sporadic correspondence from rare contacts more than a stray item of correspondence from a regular contact and these were mostly the former kind. I kinda trust that they'll come back in there--but it's weird that the issue has persisted so long; I just don't want it to be a sort of "I'm assuming it'll blow over and so did the other people affected by it" thing. So I guess my question here is has anyone seen glitches on twitter in terms of missing tweets and so forth last more than a few days?

You may wish to use a twitter client that caches your tweets on your computer instead the twitter website.

On preview, Tweetie only has 8 days of @ replies for me, but my DMs from 630 days ago are still there. On my iPhone Tweetie Twitter for iPhone has about 45 days of @ replies.

It's not a glitch - this is how Twitter works. They only keep the most recent tweets on their live servers. They probably archive all of the older tweets, but they haven't put the archive online, and possibly never will.

cillit bang, it's not a sequential roll-off like that--they literally a dropped window from December 2009 to July 2010 and are only showing sporadic tweets from July onwards

Being able to see tweets that old is very unusual. The latter is what everyone else gets.

Alright, but it doesn't mean they gotta show something from August 27 and now show the one from August 15 and then show the one from July. They're actually dropping messages ya know?

* not show the one from Aug 15

Here's the general ticket on their site for this issue: I'm Missing Mentions and @Replies (Known Issue). All these cats are commenting about it so it's a real issue when it happens don't tell me it's not, come on.

twitter/facebook are not archival services. That's why I don't use them for anything that's not completely ephemeral.