Twitter started off a micro-blogging network which was initially tooled by celebrities and the like. But over time, it has gradually converted into a real-time news and analysis medium where everyone from journalists to bloggers and common users engage.

With this new dimension of Twitter, it is becoming increasingly important for the users to be able to retrieve their posts from months ago. However, for now, this is not possible. Users are able to access only the last few thousands tweets on their profile. Beyond that, there is simply no way to access all of your older tweets.

Nonetheless, the demand for such a feature is increasing. A number of third-party apps have tried to resolve this problem but they have been able to address it only partially – for instance, some apps allow you to read your earlier tweets but not all the tweets.

The good news are that Twitter has finally taken notice of the need for such a tool. According to Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, “We’re working on a tool to let users export all of their tweets. You’ll be able to download a file of them.”

Such feature is already offered by a number of other social media sites. For instance, Facebook allows its users to download a file containing all their Facebook data. Once Twitter launches its own similar feature, it would become incredibly easy, not only for the users but also for different apps to dig through a user’s old tweets and let him search through them efficiently.

Costolo further said that despite attempts by many third-party developers, a similar tool simply can’t be launched by anyone else anytime soon. This is because, he said, it takes massive workload to create such a tool.

His exact words were, “It’s two different search problems. It’s a different way of architecting search, going through all tweets of all time. You can’t just put three engineers on it.”

Costolo didn’t give a definite date when we can expect the tool to be rolled out. But now that Twitter has started working on it, we can rest assured that it will be out soon.

Courtesy: NYTimes