X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014

In March 2012, the expanded URL enrichment was introduced. Before this time, the Tweet payloads included only the URL as provided by the user. So, if the user included a shortened URL it can be challenging to match on (expanded) URLs of interest. With both Historical PowerTrack and the Search APIs, these metadata are available starting in March 2012.

In July 2016, the enhanced URL enrichment was introduced. This enhanced version provides a web site’s HTML title and description in the Tweet payload, along with Operators for matching on those. With Historical PowerTrack, these metadata become available in July 2016. With the Search APIs, these metadata begin emerging in December 2014.

In September 2016 Twitter introduced ‘native attachments’ where a trailing shared link is not counted against the 140 Tweet character limit. Both URL enrichments still apply to these shared links.