Twitter lets you download ALL your tweets - now what?

If you haven't been hiding under a rock for the past week or so you'll have heard the incredible and fantastic news that has driven the social media pundits and pontificators into a frothy mass of joy, not to mention that quivering mass of open data evangelists over there in the corner.

You see Twitter announced that they were finally going to be adding a new feature to the service. A feature that the social media mavens like Robert Scoble and others have been begging Twitter to do since almost the first days of the service.

So what is this new feature?

Are you ready?

You can now download all your tweets that you have made since the day you joined Twitter, and all in one archived file.

Wow, neat huh.

So I ask ...

Now what?

What exactly am I supposed to do with this file?

Seriously, now that you have downloaded all those treasured messages of 140 characters that you threw out there in order to dazzle the world with your brilliance, what are you going to do with them?

I don't know about you but I couldn't care less about what I've tweeted about 5 minutes after I hit enter to send my wise words into the Twittersphere; and you know what, others couldn't care less either. So the fact that Twitter has finally implemented the option to download all your tweets is as about as useful as eating sushi with one chopstick.

Don't get me wrong, I like Twitter and have been using the service since February 2007 (and even wrote a Windows client for it) but I can see absolutely no use to having a single file containing every single thing I posted to Twitter. Sure it's nice, and will appease all those open data proponents that are constantly pushing the company to do this, but come on people, what exactly can you do with this information beyond inflate your ego a little more?

Can you import it into a competing service like app.net or perhaps identi.ca? Can you make it available for Facebook to use in some fashion - not that Facebook would want to in the first place. On top of that, even if you were able to use all that data in some other service I again have to ask ... why?

The truth is that in the end all you have from this new feature is a big lump of a file that is useless for anything.

Thanks Twitter. Thanks for nothing, because that is what this really amounts to.

(BTW ... how's that improved search feature coming?)

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