Twitter To Provide Downloadable Archive Before End of 2012

Before 2012 ends, Twitter users will be able to access and download all their personal tweets and archives and keep them offline. The news was shared recently by Dick Costolo (@dickc), chief executive of the micro-blogging giant, during a talk at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The same news was shared in San Francisco last September. Costolo further explained why these capabilities were not readily available before and how the deadline before 2012 comes to a close still means raising the bar too high. Twitter has been very active handling the huge number of new Twitter users, as well as hundreds of millions of tweets posted every single day. Currently, Twitter handles about 350 million to 400 million tweets each day, so it would be quite a challenge for them to come up with a reliable archive where online users can easily access and retrieve previous tweets and information. On the question on why Twitter users weren?t allowed to download their tweet history, Costolo shared how they were managing 1.3 million timelines during the eve of the United States presidential elections. The timeline is the home timeline of every tweet of all people being followed, equating to 1.3 million timelines each second. This means that 1.3 million timelines are threading all tweets from different parts of the globe at a rate of 15,000 tweets per second. Furthermore, Twitter needs to arrange these in chronological fashion. Should Twitter users do a search or have archive distribution activities using the platform?s database for the whole history, it would lead to the slowing down of every real-time distribution of activities and information. A unique type of archive has to be created for the tweets to improve searches without compromising speed and efficiency. Costolo cited how the company engineers are still debating on whether or not the feature would be finished on time. Twitter users are looking forward to getting more details such as the file format of the retrievable archives and other types of information that can be retrieved on the social media site.