I’ve just noticed that Twitter allows you to export your tweets, under your account settings. They come in both human and machine-readable form. Not sure how long ago they added this, but it partially addresses one of my chief concerns about the service: that users stick many years of their lives into it without necessarily knowing that they’ll ever be able to extract the information in future.
This is not easy to automate, though, so I’m still going to keep using Archive My Tweets for my own archive.
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An alternative way of dealing with this is to own your content from the beginning and syndicate it out to other services. Still using the api but to push content in rather than extract it afterwards. Downside is setting up new workflows and eschewing the 3rd-party’s apps (e.g the twitter iPhone app etc).
Hi Amir –
Yes, that’s probably a good idea. I sort of do that at present – most of my posts are to app.net (because I knew I could always extract from there) and then cross-posted, but increasingly I’m just doing blog posts and sending notifications to Twitter…