Twitter to Let Users Download Archive

By Barbara E. Hernandez

| Tuesday, Nov 27, 2012 | Updated 11:30 AM PDT

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SAN FRANCISCO - APRIL 14: Attendees mingle during a break at the first annual Chirp, Twitter Developer's Conference April 14, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Chirp, the Twitter Devloper's Conference is a two day event for developers who work with the popular social networking service. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo promised Twitter users that they will be able to download a full archive of their tweets by the end of the year.

Those planning on a book of witty tweets will likely rejoice, but this isn't the first time Costolo has made a promise, according to TechCrunch. At the Ford School of Public Policy ad School of Information at the University of Michigan, Costolo repeated the promise he made in September.

However, getting all those tweets together is going to be a fairly herculean task for its seemingly overtaxed engineers who can't even give users scheduled tweets. Costolo's deadline may seem a bit unrealistic, but isn't it about time people other than celebrity comedians writing a book get a glimpse at their archive of old tweets?

“By the end of the year I’ve already promised this, so the engineers – when I promised it publicly they’re already mad at me so they can keep being mad at me,” Costolo said at the University of Michigan. “Now, again, once again, I caveat this with the engineers who are actually doing the work don’t necessarily agree that they’ll be done by the end of the year, but we’ll just keep having that argument and we’ll see where we end up year-end.”

Sure, Twitter's numbers are huge -- 500 million tweets a day, according to numbers from October, but the microblogging service has been coasting along for a few years now without dramatic changes to the API or a number of cool features. If Twitter had been working on its infrastructure since its inception, it would already have many of these features ingrained. Instead, Twitter's system is based on real-time search and distribution rather than an archive search. So, Twitter has to build an archival system -- six years after its launch. What kind of sense does that make?

We hope that one day we can see our old tweets, but it will likely not happen before next year.