Twitter has begun rolling out a feature that its CEO had recently promised will allow users to download an archive of all the tweets from their accounts. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo had promised that the feature will be released this year and the long-awaited tool has finally arrived, but not for all. The deployment is reportedly in the testing phase and is available to only a limited set of users.
Users can check the availability of the feature by going to the settings page and looking for a link reading 'request your archive'. Upon making a request, the user will receive a link via email allowing them to download the archive. The archive will be downloaded in a compressed zip folder, with all of your tweets in a spreadsheet. Your tweets are organized by month and the feature includes a search box, making it easy to find old messages.
Costolo had reportedly set a deadline of end of 2012 to provide the feature. The complexity of archiving every tweet since the origin of the service in 2006 was a huge challenge for Twitter engineers. "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," Mr Costolo said last month.
A Twitter user by name Navjot Singh saw the feature enabled on his account. Upon sending a request for the archive, Mr. Singh received an email from Twitter which said, "We're happy to let you know that the archive you requested is now available for download. Your archive may contain sensitive content. So please keep that in mind before sharing it with anyone."
Singh shared the email with The Next Web which also published a tweet from him explaining the process: "Twitter informs that they will mail you the download link when the archive is ready. Yes, it's just like how Facebook's archive system works. Once you get the mail and download it you will get a zip file with archive in html form. Extracting it (sic) and you will see all your tweets sorted in calendar format."
"Singh has sent us a copy of this archive and we can confirm that it contains an HTML file that opens to display a page similar in layout to Twitter's own website. It allows you to browse your tweets by month, and search the complete archive. The archive also includes CSV and JSON files, the latter complete with each tweet's metadata," the report said.
