Old Tweets For Download: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Announces Archive Program
Buck up, Twitter users! Soon, you may have access to all of your old tweets, i.e., all of the tweets you have ever written, ever.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told The New York Times that they are working on a way for Twitter users to access all of their old tweets through an archive program. Twitter currently allows users to see only about a few thousand of their old tweets, but Costolo wishes to amend that soon. How soon exactly? Well, Costolo didn’t say.
“We’re working on a tool to let users export all of their tweets,” Costolo said in a meeting with reporters on Monday. “You’ll be able to download a file of them.”
Now of course, the demand for access to old tweets isn’t a new one. According to TechCrunch, many sites such as oldtweets already perform this function (sort of) by allowing users to search tweets from Twitter’s first year. Costolo’s vague timeline is also due to the fact that Twitter has exploded in recent years: Twitter now boasts over 140 million users, and many of them tweet non-stop throughout the day. The addition of an old tweets archive program is no easy feat.
“It’s two different search problems,” Costolo said. “It’s a different way of architecting search, going through all tweets of all time. You can’t just put three engineers on it.”
Still, Costolo is confident that his tech team will be able to solve the problem and provide Twitter users with a way to see every tweet they have ever posted since joining the site. Until then, you’re stuck with only a few thousand of your most recent old tweets.
