Want to Download All of Your Tweets?
I have to confess, Twitter for me is often a kind of throwaway place, and the thought of downloading what I've shared there for posterity has never crossed my mind. So news from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo that such a feature could be available to users by the end of this year strikes me as the kind of thing that's solving a problem no one is having.
Costolo made the announcement at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco this week. He told the conference that he expected users to be able to download their entire tweet history by the end of the year.
"The caveat is that this is the CEO saying this," Costolo joked, "not the engineer who's building this....[But it's] a priority we absolutely want to have out by the end of the year."
While the move may please some users (your author not included), it may annoy the developer community still further. They have already suffered from changes to the Twitter API in the past few months, and this new feature could further damage their importance to users. Costolo was bullish on this point however.
"We have tens of thousands of developers around the world who leverage [our] API and build successful businesses with it," Costolo said "We are going to build a platform that enables third-party developers to add value to Twitter and build into Twitter and get all [kinds of] additional value from our distribution engine."
Costolo went on to suggest that Twitter could potentially support real-time updates and information. "Think about it....There are all sorts of amazing functionalities that third parties can build into Twitter," he said, bringing new benefits to developers and users alike. "That's the general framework for where we're going."
With regards to downloading your tweet history though, I can certainly see the benefits of being able to download your network (and their info) on sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook, but your tweet history? Hmm. What does everyone think? Is this a feature you'd value?
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