The Twitter logo is displayed at the entrance of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.(Photo: Kimihiro Hoshino, AFP/Getty Images)
SAN FRANCISCO -- Twitter is offering its more than 200 million
users a chance to keep a digital scrapbook of all their tweets.
The
tool, announced this week, is designed to make it easier for people to
review all their activity on Twitter's trend-setting messaging service.
When it's available, the downloading option will appear at the bottom of each user's settings menu.
Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, said it may take a several weeks, or even months, before everyone gets the feature.
After
a records request is made, users will receive an email on how to
download their personal archive. For Twitter's earliest users, the
records date back to 2006 when Twitter started.
Twitter users
already have been able to peruse their past tweets by navigating to
their personal profile page. But going that route is more cumbersome
because it requires scrolling down a page that can sometimes be slow to
display additional tweets.
The company said that users who
download their entire histories should find it easier to search for
particular tweets and organize the messages - by month, for example.
The new tool also should serve as a reminder that a copy of everything people have tweeted still resides on Twitter's computers.
Other
widely used services, such as Facebook's popular social network, also
have been creating digital portraits of people's lives as more content
gets posted on their sites. Facebook gives its more than 1 billon users
the option to download everything they have shared on the service. It
has become easier this year for Facebook users to look at their past
musings and photos as the service converted people's profiles into a
timeline that sorts content by the month it was shared.
Path,
another social network founded by former Facebook executive Dave Morin,
is also trying to position itself as a treasure chest of memories. A new
feature released Thursday in an update to Path's' mobile app allows
users to search their past posts on devices running on Apple and Android
software. The content can be quickly retrieved by typing in their
names' friends, a specific event or time of year, or just a phrase
encapsulating a vacation highlight, such as "hiking in Kauai."
Associated Press