Comments on: Privacy Conundrum: Twitter Timeline Export

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 02:36:02 +0000

Tweets are public — I wouldn’t worry. Please dump all my tweets to a CSV for me!

By: Pantsland » Released: Twitter Timeline Export (TweetDumpr)

Pantsland » Released: Twitter Timeline Export (TweetDumpr) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:42:09 +0000

[...] general response to my hesitation on the release of my Twitter timeline export tool was that I should, indeed, release it. So I [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:59:05 +0000

Sweet, thanks for this! It seems almost impossible to get your full Twitter stream exported in any useful way.

I’m actually looking to switch back to WordPress from Twitter, and was wondering…is it at all possible to have this export to RSS instead of CSV? If that were the case, a WP install would be able to import the Twitter entries.

Am poking around with the XML/JSON exports Twitter allows as per the API, but this is way out of my league. :-/

By: Brad Kellett

Brad Kellett — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:42:38 +0000

Thanks for the opinions guys, I really appreciate them. I will be releasing a web version of the tool later today that will authenticate to Twitter before doing it’s thing to only let you export your own timeline.

Those that I have spoken to believe that this is a good compromise.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:09:09 +0000

If anything, I think it’s worth publishing to highlight the lack of privacy. If anyone has any illusions of their public feed being in some vague way protected, it’s important to correct that notion.

By: Mat

Mat — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:32:08 +0000

Anyone with privacy concerns obviously doesn’t understand how the inter-tubes work - it’s like getting upset because people can see your face while you walk down a street.

As already mentioned, if somebodies timeline is public already, then their timeline has no privacy, nor can they have any expectation that their timeline can have any privacy.

What about their followers who receive tweets via IM, who have IM clients which log every conversation?

I say release the script if you want to, and tell anyone who complains not to publish things to the internets if they want it to be private. Personally I don’t care if somebody chooses to read my tweets via the web interface, via IM, via SMS, or via a CSV on their hard drive.

By: Serdar Kilic

Serdar Kilic — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:16:28 +0000

Brad, if it’s already publicly available then I don’t think anyone can cry foul about any privacy issues.

By: Will

Will — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:01:11 +0000

I understand the concerns, however a user’s entire history is already cached at Google if they’re public.

In addition, a python(?) script is only going to be usable by those who already have the skill to write something like this anyway. You’re saving someone, what 20-30 minutes? There’s plenty of other things out there which will do this for you anyway, with a little prodding (wget, anyone?), but just not as cleanly.

By: Brad Kellett

Brad Kellett — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 06:07:46 +0000

m1k3y: That’s true, I could do it that way. It is a command line script at the moment, but I could make it work like that.

By: m1k3y

m1k3y — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 05:59:55 +0000

only if you publish the script, rather than just host it with your own front-end