San Francisco — Craving to revisit all the whimsical one liners you have ever tweeted? Well, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has reiterated his promise that Twitter users will be able to download their entire Tweet archives by the end of 2012.
Those planning on a book of whimsical tweets will likely rejoice, but this is not the first time Costolo has made a promise, according to TechCrunch. At a public speech delivered at Ford School of Public Policy and School of Information at the University of Michigan, Costolo confirmed that engineers were working on making a full archive of tweets available to users by the end of this year. He was there to discuss Twitter’s role in the future of global communication and democratized access to information.
Addressing the audience Costolo said, “By the end of the year I have already promised this, so the engineers — when I promised it publicly they are 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 do not necessarily agree that they will be done by the end of the year, but we will just keep having that argument and we will see where we end up year-end.”In fact, Costolo had made this statement previously too. He first declared that this feature will be made available in an interview with The New York Times in July. Then, during a keynote conversation at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco, he gave end of 2012 as the tentative deadline, taking into consideration the engineers’ capacity.
However, accumulating all those tweets together is going to be a fairly herculean task for its seemingly overtaxed engineers who can not even give users scheduled tweets.
Hence, Costolo’s deadline may seem a bit unrealistic, and using Twitter’s API, only the latest 3,200 tweets posted by any user are available at any given point of time. The tweets are arranged in the newest first order making it difficult to find a tweet you posted, say, a few months ago, especially if you happen to be a compulsive tweeter.
Certainly though, Twitter’s numbers are huge–500 million tweets a day, according to figures from October, but the micro-blogging service has been coasting along for a few years now without dramatic changes to the API or a number of cool features.
Besides, 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.
Anyways, we hope that one day we can see our old tweets, but it will likely not happen before next year.