As the final question of the Web 2.0 Summit Dick Costolo speaker dinner, O’Reilly writerAlex Howard asked about when Twitter users will be able to access their Twitter histories, “I’ve got 49,119 tweets and 1/4 as many DMs, if Google has a Data Liberation Front, and 30% of your team is former Googlers, shouldn’t you guys be working on something similar?”
While services like Backupify do provide a similar function, Howard is right. In fact I was just whining about my Twitter history and specifically DM history being unavailable at this very conference. “You had to allow one more question,” Costolo joked.
Jokes asides, Costolo eventually took the question seriously, “We want to be able to access old Tweets and old DMs, we just have to prioritize the work,” he said. ” It’s just a matter of priorities, [but] we need to get to the point when we’ll be able to do this.”
Twitter now has 700 employees and $1.6 billion in funding. “You’d think you could apply some of [those resources] to what is a long standing user request,” Howard told me after the dinner was over.