Today Twitter announced that it would be ramping up its archiving tool to cover people who use the service in 12 non-English languages: Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish and Spanish — giving the company one more way of engaging with its international audience, now 70% of its 200 million-monthly user base. The ability to access your own archive of tweets — which lets you see everything you tweeted and retweeted, and lets you retweet those tweets yet again — was first launched last year, in December, as a service only for those using Twitter in English.
It looks like today’s move has also made access to your English-language archive more widely available also to those using Twitter outside the U.S. Before today that functionality also had a limited release.
Twitter made the announcement just moments ago, on Twitter.
With the archive functionality mentioned in September 2012, and then more officially on November 2012, the move to take it international is one more sign of how Twitter is looking to increase engagement and use of the service beyond English-only audiences.
That has also seen the company make moves to expand commercial efforts abroad, too. In January, when Twitter added ad support for the Middle East and North Africa among other regions, it said that usage had tripled in that part of the world in the last year.
There is still some way to go to making the archive universal, however. In January, when Twitter noted that 70% of its 200 million monthly users came from outside the U.S. (stats it released while making that advertising push), it also said that the service is currently being used in 33 languages altogether.
It plans to eventually make archive access available to all suppported languages. “We’re rolling out this feature slowly, starting today with a small percentage of users whose language is set to English,” Twitter wrote in December 2012. “Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll make it available to all users around the world, for all the languages we offer.”
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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