During his November 16 Policy Talks @ the Ford School lecture Dick Costolo (BS '85), Twitter's CEO, made waves by announcing that by year's end Twitter users would be able to download a complete archive of their Tweets.
The online news organization Talking Points Memo covered the announcement and outlined some of the reasons why offering this capability is so difficult. Part of the explanation is that Twitter now hosts a massive 350 million tweets per day, which makes sifting through all the data particularly daunting.
As the online publication Tech Crunch pointed out in its coverage, whether Twitter can offer this capability by the end of the year ultimately depends on whether it can overcome certain engineering hurdles, like building a more suitable archival system.
Currently, users must use a third-party client to access old posts, according to a Gizmodo article which also discussed the announcement.
Coverage of Costolo's talk appeared in more than thirty news and online outlets. These include: