They place limits on how much they list for, most likely, technical difficulties with guaranteeing full history access.
This means that if you want a full history of your tweets, then it's your responsibility to maintain it. Would it be a good service to its users if Twitter maintained full history? Yes, but that's not your argument. Your argument is that it's a user's right.
Re:Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets
by moron4hire on Friday September 24, 2010 @05:35PM
(#1725522)
Does it make sense to rely on the original provider for archive? As I say in my other reply to the other replier, I really think diversity in archive options is important to the overall infrastructure of the 'Net.
1. Yes, Twitter's real-time just like the phone, but it's not only real-time like the phone. You can revisit any tweet you like. They support viewing old tweets, they support listing old tweets. My only concern is that they place limits on how much they list.
2. Yes, we're responsible for our content, but the significance of services change over time. Tomorrow's Hacker News startup might be interesting, you might drop some content in, but most people aren't going to immediately create an offsite backup. Likewise, the tweets we made in the first two years of Twitter's life probably seemed worthless to us at the time, but now their value has increased. It just would be nice to have access to that.