Twitter CEO: Downloadable tweets coming by end of year

Soon you'll be able to download your old Tweets. Fans of Twitter have been asking for the feature for a while, so it seems Twitter has sat up and listened.

Dick Costolo, the company's CEO, has said it'll be here before the end of the year, so you can store away all your 140 character bon mots for posterity. Though some are best forgotten.

Costolo was speaking at a conference for the Online News Association, The Verge reports.

He first mentioned the downloadable tweets feature to The New York Times back in July.

Costolo was also on the defensive about the company's recent API changes, which have seen it impose limits on how many people can use a third-party Twitter client. The dictat states such clients will be limited to 100,000 users before they need "permission" and/or will have to "work with [Twitter] directly". In other words, our way or the highway.

Costolo's defense? He said Twitter had to do something after it realised companies were making money from the service without adding "accretive value". So if it doesn't help Twitter grow, Costolo isn't a fan.

He also outed a new tool that'll let third parties aggregate and publish tweets as a group. Such as the most relevant concerning a recent news event, for example.

Costolo noted he was a "huge believer in syndication".

The recent API changes aren't exactly unexpected. It's classic behaviour from an Internet company that's seen huge growth without any clear way of making money. Once it has the massive user base, in come the swingeing business practices.

Will you be downloading your old tweets? What do you think of how Twitter's been acting lately? Is it panicking and trying to actually make some money? Or just showing some business nous? Let me know in the comments or on our Facebook page.