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

The tool now carries one of the most attractive names around: TweetDumpr. With it, you can export your entire Twitter timeline to a CSV (comma separated value) file, which can be read by any spreadsheet application. To get around the lingering privacy issues, the tool now requires you to authenticate to Twitter first, which makes sure you are only dumping your timeline and not someone else’s.

Currently, the tool only works on public timelines, but a new version is already in the works that handles protected users. Feel free to give it a go and report back on bugs that you encounter – it is still in the early stages of development.

As part of developing the Twitter Stats application, I created a standalone script that will dump a user’s entire Twitter timeline to a CSV file (comma separated value, readable by spreadsheet applications such as Excel), including the tweet text and the post time.

Initially, it was my intention to release this script to the public. I had several requests from people that wanted to have a record of all their tweets, which I kindly provided for them, and in my opinion the tool would prove quite useful.

After mentioning this to a couple of very smart people, they raised privacy concerns and suggested I keep the code to myself, which I have done thus far. These concerns stem from the fact that the tool can dump any user’s entire non-protected timeline, not just your own. Personally, I don’t really think this is a huge problem – if you have an unprotected timeline, all your tweets are public record anyway, the tool just makes it easier to extract and save these tweets. On the other hand, someone having a local copy of your stream does sound like a worrying proposition.

Clearly, there are far larger privacy issues associated with all of this, but I wanted to open up the floor and find out what other people think of the possible release of this tool. Should I put it out there, or keep it to myself?