Blasting through X (Twitter) bookmarks

After years of accumulating tweets, I decided to tackle the monstrous backlog of 1,237 bookmarks on Twitter. (I’m almost kicking myself for not waiting just a few more days to hit the 1,337 marker.)

However, the web and mobile interfaces are painful for loads of content: slow to load, can’t group and categorize after the fact, can’t quickly open them in new tabs (“_blank”) and, worst of all, you can’t access these via API.

So, I used a simple Chrome extension to export the raw list of tweets. Then, with a little help from Claude, I wrote a Python script to do the heavy lifting: export the data, automatically sort and group each into distinct categories, and put them into a more readable format. The goal was to create a single-serving, local page that would let me finally blast through my reading list in a weekend.

My categories and counts reveal a lot about what captured my attention over the years, and honestly, the distribution probably still holds true today:

Investing & Finance (387), AI & Machine Learning (264), Other (103), Startups & Entrepreneurship (82), Productivity & Tools (77), Long Reads & Essays (70), Career & Professional Growth (56), Media & Entertainment (55), Design & Creativity (54), Tech Industry & News (44), Society & Culture (21), Health & Longevity (13), Images & Visual Content (8), Humor & Fun (3)

Reviewing six or seven years of bookmarks was a fascinating trip down memory lane. It was interesting to see which posts and articles have genuinely stood the test of time. And, which haven’t: oddly, a lot of crypto content. I bookmarked many crypto tweets during the intense 2020–2022 period because it was all moving so quickly that it was impossible to keep up. In a way, the current flow of AI (Code! Cowork! OpenClaw! Tunnel straight into your Mac mini at home!) updates feels similar. A constant stream of new information you probably want to save-for-later. Except this time, I’m not: I’m reading them because it’s so much fun to be building using these tools.

If you’re ready to tackle your own archive, here are the two tools you’ll need:

  1. Use the X Bookmarks Exporter Chrome extension to export a CSV of all your bookmarks.
  2. Feed the output to the x-bookmarks-viewer python script to process the data and design a single-serving page locally. You can fork it, drop in your own CSV export, run 'python process_bookmarks.py`, and have your own organized bookmarks viewer.