"Costolo wouldn't say when the tool might launch, noting that the tool isn't as simple as it sounds to make, and requires a good amount of manpower and ingenuity..."

From Business Insider, citing the New York Times.

It's not simple to make? Give us unlimited API access and we'll show you how simple it could be.

In my best @dickc voice:

Giving you unlimited API access isn't as simple as it sounds to make, and requires a good amount of manpower and ingenuity. Come back to us in three years...

Well you have to understand ... there are tweets on silicon, tweets on magnetic disk, then the older tweets on reel to reel, and QIC24 and 8mm and ... and ... while dd(1) is all knowing ... it isn't that simple :-)

Doesn't the field of data warehousing cover this kind of condition?

Only if there is a fact table with conformed dimensions.

Oh.

Right.

NoSQL means always having to say you're sorry.

But who really cares for the old tweets?

Instead they should focus on some filter mechanism. The stream of tweets i get is too much to handle. It makes no real sense. If i keep my twitter tab open for say..20 mins, i get a notification bar saying..50 new tweets. Do the math for the number of tweets in 24 hrs. How can one consume so many tweets.

I know its very hard to solve this.. but this should be in their priority list rather than giving access to older tweets.

I'd like access to all the tweets but, admittedly my backward searching would be infrequent.

I'd like my old tweets. There are some bona fide gems in there. :)

And yes, in the future, filtering would be good too. For now, give me everything, please.

It's not really for my backward searching.

I want others who search for me (on, say, Google), to be able to find my old tweets.

The team is experimenting with filtering - there's already a live tool (limited testing) that uses your history to filter your stream (similar to the logic they use to pick tweets to send you in an email wrap up). This should be a big boon for power users and present an interesting oppty for Twitter to increase engagement. I'm not sure the average user follows enough people to care - does anyone know th average # of msgs a normal is delivered on a given day?

The export tool will be a personal backup -- Costolo specifically said that this would be downloadable and limited to just your tweets. Don't think this will get us any closer to google access. It will make for interesting data portability options and I'm a big fan of it for that reason. Could end up being a boon to something like app.net if it ever galvanizes enough power user interest.

If I download my tweets am I allowed to upload them to another service?

Twitter's terms of use are very unclear about this.