In a move that mirrors some other social nets, Twitter has turned on the ability to download all your tweets–ever.
Twitter is enabling users to download an archive of all the content they’ve transmitted through its social networking systems.
Simply by visiting their Twitter profile on the web, then visiting the Settings page and hitting the “Your Twitter Archive” option, users activate the service. A personalized email then arrives with a link to download a zip file that contains the archive in HTML format, including each tweet’s metadata–meaning it’s searchable using standard tools.
Twitter’s CEO had promised a few months ago that the archiving feature would eventually arrive. The initial archive system in use now has been released as part of a limited-scale test, so it may not appear in your particular profile. Ownership of content submitted to sites like Twitter has become a hot topic for various reasons, including data privacy and hacking, with Facebook under particular scrutiny due to the sheer volume of personal data users upload.
Would you download your Twitter data for fun? Are you tempted to process it to look for interesting trends and patterns in the way you tweet?
By Kit Eaton
