Twitter begins testing tweet archive downloads with select users

Twitter silently started testing the highly anticipated tweet downloading feature that CEO Dick Costolo has repeatedly promised, but the feature appears to be running into problems already.

It’s finally here, the feature that many of us have been waiting for: Twitter has started rolling out the option to download your full history of tweets, all the way back to your very first one.

Twitter user @Philsophy found the feature the feature, according to TheNextWeb. At the moment, however, it apparently isn’t available to all users. In case you are one of the lucky first few users to have the feature turned on for your account, you can find out by browsing to your settings page. Look for a link to “Your Twitter Archive.” There, you can click on an option download your tweets. Twitter will send you an email notifying you of your request along with a zip file of the tweets attached in HTML form. Based on blogger Navjot Singh’s experience, the HTML file opens up a calendar-like interface that displays the archived tweets, which you can search through by month, as shown in the screenshot by Singh below.

Despite the pressure on Twitter’s engineers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo appears to have pulled through with his promise, which he reiterated last month during a speaking engagement at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. At the time, Costolo said, “Now, again, once again, I caveat this with the engineers who are actually doing the work don’t necessarily agree that they’ll be done by the end of the year, but we’ll just keep having that argument and we’ll see where we end up year end.”

Until now, users have only the option to download up to the 3,200 most-recent tweets using third party services, like TweetDownload.net.

Twitter confirmed with us that they were testing the archive downloading feature with a “small percentage” of users. But it appears that the social network is already under a heavy load. Twitter is having trouble rendering its pages, which were regularly crashing at the time of this writing.

Twitter declined to say exactly what was causing the page load problems. But Costolo warned during his speech that Twitter wasn’t built for searching and distributing archives: Searching through an archive using Twitter’s user database “would be so slow that it would slow down the rest of the real-time distribution of things,” he said. And it looks like this is exactly what was happening.

If the site in fact has been slowed down due to testing the archive download feature among just a few users, this would likely mean that the Twitter Archive functionality won’t be ready for prime time before the New Year rolls around.

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Dish Network employees will be allowed to tweet freely once more

Does a company have the right to prevent employees from sharing their thoughts about their company on social media? That's the question at the center of a new legal ruling issued today.

It’s understandable, perhaps, that some companies would want to cut down on the amount of time that employees spend on social media during work hours, especially if the amount of time spent playing Words with Friends or Avengers Assemble is impacting productivity overall for the business as a whole. But when it comes to trying to limit social media access because of the subject matter of Tweets or Facebook status updates, that’s an entirely different thing altogether – and one that, thankfully, is being challenged and pushed back upon by authorities.

The National Labor Relations Board has ordered Dish Network to reverse its Social Media policy as it appears in the current version of its employee handbook, in the process signalling that it will be more active in monitoring and combating similar corporate policies in future. As it stands, Dish’s policy prohibits employees from sharing any message that could be considered either disparaging or defamatory towards the company on social media. It was one of a number of companies named in a May statement from the NLRB as having social media policies that went “overboard” in their reach and may be in breach of federal law protecting the right of workers to self-organize, join or assist labor organizations to collectively bargain for better working conditions and wages – others included General Motors and Target – but really moved into the NLRB’s targets following the dismissal of a technician later in the year.

The technician in question was fired for violating safety protocol by not wearing either his safety harness nor protective eyewear when installing a satellite dish; when the technician approached the NLRB protesting his dismissal, the organization began looking into Dish’s attitude towards collective bargaining and unionizing, and discovered the company’s social media policy. What was particularly worrying to the NLRB was that said policy prohibited employees from commenting publicly electronically about the company even on their own time, as well as the company’s “Contact with Government Agencies” policy which, somewhat amazingly, requires employees to get management permission before speaking to anyone from the authorities regarding Dish policies.

In his ruling, Administrative Law Judge Robert Ringler ordered the company to immediately stop enforcing both the social media and government agencies policies, and provide employees with new guidelines in both areas, as well as ensure that staff is given appropriate notifications about the changes. In a statement issued in response, Dish said that “although DISH agrees with the Judge’s decision upholding the termination of an employee for violation of DISH’s safety rule, DISH disagrees with his statement regarding its Social Media policy. DISH is in the process of evaluating its legal options.”

Expect an appeal sooner rather than later, in other words. For now, however: Tweet without fear, Dish employees.

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Tweet cloud generator Cumulotweetus now in the Windows Phone Store, temporarily free

Behold, Cumulotweetus

The latest update to the super popular gl??k! Twitter client gave users the ability to create ‘Tweet clouds’ within the app. A Tweet cloud is basically a collection of words and phrases associated with a specific person on Twitter.

The addition proved to be so popular that favorite Windows Phone dev Liquid Daffodil decided to make a whole app dedicated to just that feature, but with even more control and options.

And thus Cumulotweetus was born and is now ready for download.

Cumulotweetus for Windows Phone

From the app description:

"Get the coolest way to see and share what your Twitter friends and followers are saying by creating "Tweet Clouds" from your timeline, mentions, any other user's timeline, and ever from random users from around the world with Cumulotweetus!"

Create, save, and share tweet clouds!Post to Social and let users around the worlds see your clouds!Change background colors, word colors, and even font styles!Customize selected words, mentions or hashtags that you want removed from your cloud!Select the language of your "stop words" to more accurately reflect what really matters in your clouds!

As to be expected from any Liquid Daffodil app, the design of Cumulotweetus is sharp and eye catching. The light blue and orange work well together as do the bold pictures and Tile format for the app. It’s also smooth and fast and yes, the created clouds also just pop. The app is simply fun and well thought out.

Generated Tweet Cloud

Cumulotweetus will normally fetch for a modest $0.99 with a free trial but through the end of the day Tuesday, you can grab the app for absolutely nothing. Of course once you lock in that freebie, it’s free forever including updates with new features, meaning there is little reason to not give this a shot if social-networks are your thing.

Pick up Cumulotweetus here in the Windows Phone Store for $0.00 until Tuesday night.

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