Data portability is good both for users and systems. But I like being able to export my data for another reason: search. Some times I want to build on an old conversation. It would be easier with an eidetic memory. Lacking that, knowing the terms I would have used, searching for it should yield that conversation. Except social media sites tend to suck at search. Twitter only goes so far back. Facebook searches contacts, pages, etc but not content like status updates. Even this WordPress site is far better at a term entered matching the same term that exists in the system.

Twitter intends to let us download a file with our tweets. I am excited because I can search it.

“We’re working on a tool to let users export all of their tweets,” Mr. Costolo said in a meeting with reporters and editors at The New York Times on Monday. “You’ll be able to download a file of them.”

Probably it will disappoint. The main disappointment will be that replies from others will not be present. So I will see where I address something to someone else, but not what they said to prompt the response or other’s followup. It will be like listening to someone have a conversation on a mobile phone where you get only half the conversation. At least, when I went to look at my earliest entries in Facebook’s archive file when it operated like Twitter, that was the disappointment I had.

P.S. What a bad title, right?
🙂