Twitter Prepping Tool to Let Users Troll Through Old Tweets

If you want a good laugh, try looking at the 140-word gems you posted to Twitter in 2006. Back then, when Twitter was still in its infancy, you might have been tweeting about your MySpace profile layout, a new gadget called the iPhone, or your displeasure about the season one finale of Lost.

Sadly, however, a trip down memory lane is not so easy for avid tweeters, as the site only gives users access to the last few thousand tweets they posted. But that could soon change.

Twitter's chief executive, Dick Costolo, told The New York Times this week that the popular micro-blogging site will eventually let users download a record of every single Tweet they ever posted. Twitter's engineers are currently developing a tool to let users troll through all of their old posts.

"We're working on a tool to let users export all of their tweets," Costolo told reporters and editors from the Times this week. "You'll be able to download a file of them."

There's no word yet as to when the tool will be made available to the public, but sit tight: Costolo said he's confident it will be released at some point.

But here's the caveat: you'll be able to look at only the tweets you have posted — not Twitter's complete trove of retro posts. Costolo said the company has no plans at the moment to give users a way to search through the entire archive of tweets posted to the service by every user. That functionality, he indicated, would require more work.

"It's two different search problems," Costolo was quoted as saying. "It's a different way of architecting search, going through all tweets of all time. You can't just put three engineers on it."

For the time being, users can search look through some of the first tweets to hit Twitter's servers back in 2006 thanks to a site known as oldtweets. Facebook, meanwhile, already lets users download a file with all their data.