Twitter CEO On When Users Will Be Able To “Liberate” Old Tweets: We’re Working On Working On It

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Monday, October 17th, 2011
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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.


Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Launch Date: March 21, 2006
Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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