Note: Opinions expressed here are my own, and not that of my employer, Cuil.

Google is full of creative, smart, and innovative people, but above all else, they are a fantastic PR machine. Sometimes it’s because of a carefully executed PR plan; sometimes it’s just because they are such a household name; either way, anything the giant does becomes news.

There is discussion at the moment about Google stealing the up-and-coming competition’s thunder, and I’d be lying if I didn’t feel the same at times. Take Cuil’s recent launch of timelines, followed just a few weeks later with Google’s News Timeline launch, and inclusion of it’s experimental timeline result view into the normal search results days later. We tweaked our related searches to make them better, then Google did the same thing a short time later (there are others doing related searches as well, it’s just a good idea).

But you know what? We get over it.

Competition is good for the industry, and we welcome it from competitors big and small. Google wouldn’t be the successful company it is if they didn’t notice what was going on around them and react accordingly. Any company looking to catch up to Google is doing the exact same thing.

Cuil is largely written off in the press, so we never expect to get the same reaction when launching new features. That’s not going to stop us: we’re going to keep innovating and trying to make discovering information easier and more enjoyable. If Google wants to implement some of our ideas, they can go right ahead – the difference is in the execution, and every search engine needs to learn that ideas are only half the equation. You need to take these ideas and make them into features that average people enjoy using. We try to create a human-focused search engine, easing exploration, instead of being a dull list that amounts to a popularity contest.

We’re not as big as Google yet, but we’re still here, and we’re not going to stop bringing a fresh perspective to search.

Just a quick note to let folks know that I’ve finally taken the time to rewrite TweetDumpr. It now actually works again, plus it’s quite a bit faster as well. The two limitations are that it will only be able to get the latest 3200 tweets from your timeline, and it will only work for unprotected users (feel free to temporarily unprotect your timeline then lock it down again when TweetDumpr has done it’s thing).

Leave a comment on this post or use the contact form if you have any problems or requests.

Read about some changes and updates.

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.

Update: I have now released the tool.

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?