Back in July, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed the micro-blogging website was readying a tool that will allow users to download all their old tweets. Now the exec has said that the tool will be available for general users by the end of this year.
“We’ve known for a long time that for events in the real world, the shared experience is on Twitter,” says Costolo, according to Reuters. “We want to create an ability to curate those events.” Costolo also defended the company’s recent changes to its API rules, which includes limits for third-party Twitter clients.
Currently, it is quite tough to find all the old messages on Twitter, even after a few days. However, there are some third-party apps that allow you to have a back up of all your tweets. But most of them are costly and tedious. The new Twitter API rules allow third party apps to access to a user’s last 3,200 tweets.
The exec said Twitter needed to take measures after it was observed that the others were making money off their services without provided “accretive value”. He said Twitter is working on a new tool that allow third-parties to aggregate and publish group of tweets, such as those posted related to a news event.
Costolo also highlighted the growing popularity of the tweet box. He said, “We want to migrate to a world in which the 140 characters can serve as a caption for additional functionality. We’d like that to include things like real-time data, even an application functionality.”
Facebook, the largest social networking website, already has such a system in place, known as expanded archive. Users can import all their Facebook photos and messages. The archive also includes videos, wall posts, contacts of the friends.
Source: Reuters