Gone will be the days of scrolling through pages and pages of your Tweets or Twitter’s clunky search to find something you once posted. Twitter is in the process of rolling out a “Download all your Tweets” feature, which has been formally announced today on the Twitter Blog.
To get your archive, go to the Settings area and look for the new “Your Twitter archive” feature:
Due to high demand, don’t be surprised if you get an error message like this:
But keep trying, until you get a success screen that offers a link you can use to download the archive:
You’ll then get an email like this:
That leads to a page within Twitter where you can do your download:
After clicking download, a ZIP file will be downloaded. When you open that file, you’ll see a readme file with these instructions:
# How to use your Twitter archive data The simplest way to use your Twitter archive data is through the archive browser interface provided in this file. Just double-click index.html from the root folder and you can browse your entire history of Tweets from inside your browser. In the `data` folder, your Twitter archive is present in two formats: JSON and CSV exports by month and year. * CSV is a generic format that can be imported into many data tools, spreadsheet applications, or consumed simply using a programming language. ## JSON for Developers * The JSON export contains a full representation of your Tweets as returned by v1.1 of the Twitter API. See https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1 for more information. * The JSON export is also used to power the archive browser interface (index.html). * To consume the export in a generic JSON parser in any language, strip the first and last lines of each file. To provide feedback, ask questions, or share ideas with other Twitter developers, join the discussion forums on https://dev.twitter.com.
Clicking that index.html file is pretty easy. Here’s how it looks on my Mac:
Selecting that brought up this super-impressive navigation page:
Selecting any of the bars for a particular month jumps you to all the tweets you made in that month. You can also navigate from month-to-month using buttons at the top of the particular month’s stream of tweets. See how the arrow shows one of the buttons, and how it will jump me forward a month:
Even better, you can keyword search. Just use the search box at the top of the navigation page:
See our separate story that goes into more depth about the search aspect on our sister-site Search Engine Land:
This is impressive, far more than I was expecting from Twitter. I figured we’d just get a download of tweets, not a useful way to navigate through them.
If you don’t see the feature yet, Twitter says to hang in there. It’s rolling out slowly, starting first with a small percentage of users who have their language set to English. It’s promised to go global over “the coming weeks and months.”
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