Dive summary:

• Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo announced plans that by the end of the year every tweet a user has sent can be downloaded.
• A Twitter user can currently see their most recent 3,200 tweets without using an outside application.
• The download function could benefit companies in litigation regarding tweets or that need a record of tweets from corporate accounts.

From the article:

… "[Twitter's] really horribly suited to archive search and archive distribution. So if you wanted to do a search against our user database, our user [database] for that entire history, it would be so slow that it would slow down the rest of the real-time distribution of things," Costolo said during his speech (at the University of Michigan).

"So what we're doing to enable users to download the entire archive history of their tweets is, as you can imagine, creating a different kind of archival system for these tweets. We're in the process of doing that now." …