Twitter recently introduced a feature to download all your tweet history. Why would you want to do that? I asked my network this morning because I couldn’t think of a pre-caffeinated good reason, luckily I got three great ones back:
@Documentally – https://twitter.com/Documentally
“@markmapstone some people use twitter as a diary. Where does that diary go when twitter shuts down. Data portability is a good thing.”
Whilst I cannot imagine Twitter shutting down, I can imagine it getting really bad and people choosing to leave for another service. Therefore, data portability is essential, if you want to carry across your ‘history’ to another service.
@colonel_sponsz – https://twitter.com/colonel_sponsz
“@markmapstone Because twitter’s own search and history tools are so bad that it’s next to impossible to go back to find something.”
Indeed, Twitter’s search is so full of holes a doily maker would be proud. Currently I either favourite things I want to remember immediately (short term) or consider them ‘lost’ in the twitter ether (long term) and search harder on some other service (usually Google) for a reference someone else may have made about the thing I want to refer to. However I can’t imagine regularly downloading all my Twitter history just to find a Tweet. My bet is, Twitter’s search will improve. I’m not holding my breath for that, though.
@steveellwood – https://twitter.com/steveellwood
“@markmapstone download tweets – as a journal, capture links, conversations, to record what you’ve said. Why would service provider prevent?”
Steve’s reply connects with Documentally’s – It’s the duty of a provider, to allow data download. Period. Even if we don’t have a reason to do it, why wasn’t it there from the beginning? No big conspiracy there, I believe it was just on the technical to-do list that took longer than intended to give to us all.
Either way, now we have access to this content. Developers will explore how we can all benefit from extracting our or someone else’s timeline of tweet’s. I’m looking forward to seeing how this appears. For example, a company could pull and select Tweets to show an edited history on their ‘about’ page; we could create stats of our content to create our own infographics – instead of going through another service provider. I’m sure there’s many more ways, so if you hear of any good examples – please share the link.
Mark