MG Siegler of TechCrunch writes:
Another untapped treasure trove is tweet archives. Face it, a part of Twitter is about vanity. And that’s why it’s kind of insane that you can’t see what you’ve tweeted or what others have tweeted at you beyond a few days in the past. Just imagine if you had full access to your tweet archives.
Better: imagine if Twitter organized your tweet archives in a way that was useful. What if you could see what you talked about most often during a set period of time? Or if you could see your tweets in a calendar view as a ready-made diary of sorts? Sure, some third-party services do some of this, but Twitter, with full access to all of the data, could presumably do it better.
One of my favorite features of Foursquare is the History page. And the latest version of the service is finally taking advantage of it, telling you things such as the last time you checked-in to a particular venue. Imagine if Twitter could tell you the same types of things about your tweets?
Twitter has saved all of the tweets ever sent (again, some 20 terabytes worth), but the vast majority are just sitting there, dormant. There are a number of ways to make them useful again. If nothing else, for nostalgia purposes and pure vanity.
Honestly, I had forgotten about this. I use Backupify to backup all of my tweets to Amazon in a PDF format so at least I have them (as well as Flickr, WordPress and Google Docs and Facebook posts / photos). I guess this was no longer a priority in my mind. This I wrote in August of 2009 where I argued that I’d like to pay for Twitter Pro. The post is a bit outdated now, but I’ve copied it below and marked in bold things that have been done.
That old question of monetizing the service continues to come up so I’d like to say that I’m fully prepared to pay for Twitter even if it means that I have to trick them into thinking I’m a business. In my opinion, pro features intended for businesses will still be useful to us normal users. Here is a list of feature requests I personally want with Twitter Pro that’s slated to be released by the end of 2009.
- Analytics (clicks, retweets, follows, unfollows, mindshare, my network view, stickiness of my content)
- Reports (on-demand reports that allow me to export those analytics that Twitter is tracking)
- Ad-Free. Supposedly Twitter will neve have ads but I’d like my pro account to filter out all ads
- Extended Direct Message lengths. Extend it to 250 characters.
- Improved “Find People” features
- Spam filters (auto-DMs, Auto-follows & auto-replies are filtered out based on timing and tone of the tweets)
- File transfer over Public or Direct Messages. Small under 1 megabyte images or audio files)
- Groups (I will never use it but I might as well include it)
- Data Portability (Twitter is a member of DataPortability but they hold your tweets hostage. No more!)
- 99.99% Uptime Guaranteed
- Improved Speed (pro users are on more powerful servers)
- Ability to see conversations on Twitter.com (technology is there. it’s only used on search.twitter.com)
- Twitter Store (Apparel, Shirts, Hats, Stickers)
- Unlimited API Calls, Tweets, Direct Messages and Followers Per Hour (Too many limits now)
- Better analysis of new followers (just like FriendFeed does)
- Integration with TwitVite
- Integration with TweetMic
- Integration with TwitPic
- Integration with YFrog
- 6 Hour Response time to Support Inquiries (Premiere-Ticketing System)
Before you comment with something snarky, I’d like to say that any 5 of these features would do it for me but if all of these features were available, I’d pay….
$99 a month
That’s right. I would give Twitter $1200 a year if all of these features were enabled and the site was faster. A Pipe dream? Of course but I’ll settle for 5 of these for a cool $49 a year.
So, the product itself hasn’t really integrated too many of these obvious changes. For those of us the rely on Twitter (nearly every business in the world), these seem like obvious changes that could help everyone.