The Next Web are reporting that Twitter is currently testing a new feature with a ‘very small percentage’ of users. That new feature is the ability to download every single tweet you’ve posted, ever. Personally that’s more than 35,000 tweets since joining many years ago.
If you’re lucky enough to be in the small test group, you’ll find the new feature by going to Twitter settings and at the bottom will be an option called ‘Your twitter archive’. Reportedly the formats available are HTML, CSV and JSON.
While having access to your old tweets may not excite you at first read, let me expand on why this feature is awesome. Each individual tweet isn’t that interesting on it’s own, but by analysing trends across all of your posts, the information becomes a lot more interesting.
Make no mistake, there will be new apps and services that spring up to do this analysis and highlight seriously awesome information. Imagine if you knew the most influential tweet you have ever posted. Or the person with the most followers that retweeted you, this kind of information is incredibly valuable. This type of information from history, could influence the way you tweet in the future.
I also expect companies that are already comfortable with interpreting and making sense of big data to lead the way here. Presenting data visually can also help. Imagine you uncover a behaviour in your own tweets that you never knew. Something like your most successful tweet was posted at 3pm on Tuesday, but the most common time you post is at 7am on Monday. You’d take that information and use it to your advantage.
While twitter’s own analysis service was displayed in an end-of-the-year post recently, they could potentially overtake Google Trends as the tool to analyse the heartbeat of the web. Let’s hope this feature is rolled out quickly and we can begin to leverage that hard work done over years on twitter.
More @ TheNextWeb
