Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (
@dickc) recently announced that the company will be making a lot of adjustments so that users can better monitor and store their tweets and other online information.
A new feature that will allow online users to download the full history of their tweets is now available. The new option will enable users to categorize and search for previous posts.
This can be very helpful for social and entrepreneurial purposes, since the tweets will be arranged for you to review depending on your social media objectives.
Downloading Tweets
The new feature can be discovered by selecting the Settings link located just below the bigger gear icon on the website home page.
Look at the base of the Account screen and you will find a huge button stating "Request your archive" below the new section indicating "Your Twitter Archive."
The button should be available if Twitter has activated it for your online account.
Currently, a number of Twitter users can already find the ?Request your archive? button in their account settings. This is not yet available to all at present, although Twitter is in the process of making the feature available to more users over the next few weeks.
Users can request or ask for a file that includes all the tweets they have posted since they started using Twitter. The tweets will be arranged chronologically.
You will receive an email containing the link to the file as soon as it is available for download.
Below the button, you will find the instructions saying that you can request a file which contains the information you?re looking for, beginning with the first Tweet. You will then be emailed a link once the file is ready to be downloaded.
Accessing Data
The new feature appears to be available in waves. According to Dick Costolo, the download feature for every tweet that every Twitter user has ever posted should be available before the end of 2012. The announcement was made by the Twitter CEO in September 2012 at a conference.
Much of the work is to be done by Twitter engineers. Costolo further explained how complicated the process was, considering that Twitter has over 1 billion users and handles 400 to 500 billion tweets per day. Many of the Twitter engineers say that the feature might not fully be completed by the end of the year, although they are doing their best to meet the deadline.
The recent feature allows Twitter to contend with other online companies that let users access information that they provided to the social media service. Facebook and Google also feature the same capabilities so that users can monitor their own data and keep it for various online objectives.
There is a dedicated data liberation group created on Google that will let users get data in a portable and open format. The tweets can easily be accessed and downloaded if contained in a single file. Twitter realized that its interface is rather challenging when user are trying to read previous tweets. They have to go through so many tweets before finding the one they?re looking for. Otherwise, the tweet could be lost forever.
Before downloading, your will be alerted that the material may have sensitive content so you have to constantly practice caution before sharing. The archive will be downloaded as a .zip file. Simply unzip the file and then open ?index.html? to view the contents.
You can transfer the contents using other programs and applications depending on your specific preference. Save the files accordingly then arrange depending on your objectives.
Other Twitter users who still do not have the feature available in the meantime can expect to have access in the next few weeks.
