I've been talking with some of my Twitter friends in the Portland area
and they / we are somewhat frustrated by the fact that we can only
retrieve the most recent 3200 tweets via the API. I can't speak for
everyone, but when I started on Twitter, it was a smallish phenomenon,
known to some of the "big names" in the blogging world (not me) and to
people interested in Ruby and Rails (me). In fact, some of those big
names openly criticized Twitter for a variety of reasons.

But Twitter has evolved into a business communications tool. Given
that, we need tools to track our conversations, archive them, manage
them, etc. Given the API, I can build tools like that, and I'm sure
many other developers can as well. The best example I've seen so far is
CoTweet. That takes care of the present and the future. What I *can't* do
is go back in time and say, "Hey -- I should have known that this thing was
gonna be a business tool and so I should have tracked / archived / managed
all my tweets from Thu Feb 01 05:03:16 +0000 2007".

In my case, 3200 tweets goes back to some time in January of this
year. So I'm missing about two years of history. I would like to
petition Twitter to allow an authenticated user to retrieve *all* of
his / her *own* tweets back as far as the Twitter database holds them.
I don't particularly care about other peoples' tweets -- what I do
with them is heavily biased towards *recent* activity. But I'd sure
like to get my whole stream back as far as you have it.