Twitter, the social-networking company that features 140-character status updates, is letting users download an archive of posts to make its site more alluring as competition with Facebook Inc. escalates.
The move is designed to make it easier to view tweets by month or search for certain words and phrases, the San Francisco-based company said Thursday on its blog.
“It’s no secret: You make Twitter what it is. And if you tweet, you may have found yourself wanting to go back in time and explore your past Tweets. Maybe you wanted to recall your reaction to the 2008 election, reminisce on what you said to your partner on your 10th anniversary, or just see your first few Tweets. We know lots of you would like to explore your Twitter past,” Molly Vandor of Twitter wrote.
“Today, we’re introducing the ability to download your Twitter archive, so you’ll get all your Tweets (including Retweets) going back to the beginning. Once you have your Twitter archive, you can view your Tweets by month, or search your archive to find Tweets with certain words, phrases, hashtags or @usernames. You can even engage with your old Tweets just as you would with current ones.”
Twitter is adding tools to help it win Web surfers and advertising dollars from social-networking rival Facebook. The archiving feature comes a week after the company unveiled color filtering for photos uploaded to applications for Apple Inc. iPhones and Google Inc. Android phones. The move may help it compete with Facebook’s Instagram, which earlier in the month had made it harder for users to display their photos on Twitter.
Starting Thursday, some people can request their archive of tweets by pressing a button in Twitter’s settings. The option will become available to all users in the coming months, the company said.
Facebook began to encourage its members to relive memories on the social network last year, when it introduced the “Timeline” profile for viewing photos and events from the past.
(Bloomberg contributed to this report.)
