Twitter may be in the midst of a rather dramatic fall from grace amongst the technology community, but the company has announced at least one piece of news which is certain to bring a smile to the faces of the Technorati.
Since Twitter made it big, we’ve all been wishing it was possible to download an archive of all the tweets we ever posted. Twitter itself has not offered such a feature, while web-apps such as ThinkUp have tried to bridge the gap for those willing to setup their own web server in order to keep their 140-character musings for posterity.
Now though, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has confirmed for the first time that users will indeed be able to download their history of tweets for safekeeping. What’s more, they’ll be able to do just that by the end of the year. Finally!
One of the arguments laid at the feet of Twitter since day one has been the fact that our tweets just disappear into the ether after a set period of time, with no way of retrieving tweets from months or years ago, even though Twitter itself does keep them. Now it seems the social network is in agreement that this is a feature that should be available to all, and is bringing it to its millions of users within a couple of months.
This is some welcome good news for Twitter, with something of an internet backlash currently underway over the company’s treatment of those utilizing its APIs. Various developers have been forced to change their products due to Twitter’s new stance on clients hooking into its service, which has let to a furor of sorts across the web. With Twitter having been built into what it is thanks to some great third-party clients for the iPhone in particular, the move to lock some out has been seen as a slap in the face for those that helped build Twitter in the first place.
We’re not sure Twitter itself really cares about that, and with the firm still scrambling to find a real way of monetizing its service, we suspect it has bigger fish to fry.
(via Reuters)
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