Popular micro-blogging company Twitter is working on making its service more useful, and users will soon be able to access and download all of their old tweets, company CEO Dick Costolo told The New York Times. Twitter currently allows users only to browse back through a few thousands of their tweets, but without the ability to download and archive them.
This is a welcome change users have waited for some time now, but there is no word yet on when the new feature will become available. Costolo declined to give a timeline. Still, Twitter should jump in the game soon enough, especially considering that other third-party platforms already offer such services. Facebook's Download Your Information and Google Takeout have already given their users access to data archives. They are indeed older than Twitter, but the micro-blogging site is still trailing far behind in terms of data portability.
"We're working on a tool to let users export all of their tweets," Costolo said on Monday, July 23, during a meeting with reporters and editors at The New York Times. "You'll be able to download a file of them."
The ability to access and download a copy of your data archives was not a top priority when Twitter had far fewer users and did not register such massive numbers of tweets. Now, however, the six-year-old micro-blogging site has more than 140 million users, many of which have tweeted tens of thousands of times.
Users have been expecting and demanding this function for quite some time, and the great demand was also reflected in the creation of sites such as oldtweets, which allows users to search through some posts from Twitter's first year. While there are many, many boring tweets from that time, oldtweets still came with something Twitter did not offer.
Meanwhile, Costolo also noted that the new tool will allow users to browse through all of their own old posts, but the company is not working on a tool to browse every tweet ever. "It's two different search problems," said the CEO. "It's a different way of architecting search, going through all tweets of all time. You can't just put three engineers on it."
Outlining other priorities for making the service more useful, Costolo also told the Wall Street Journal on Monday that Twitter is working to expand an underdeveloped strategy to help its users benefit from blasts of messages concentrated around major events and sports, building up a stronger presence around live "tentpole" events. Twitter has also set up a dedicated Olympics hub in a partnership with NBCUniversal.
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