Twitter to let users download archives

A new tool allowing review of all activity will be available to all over next few months. Users who download their histories should find it easier to search for particular tweets and organize the messages.

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter is offering its more than 200 million users a chance to keep a digital scrapbook of all their tweets.

The tool, announced this week, is designed to make it easier for people to review all their activity on Twitter’s trend-setting messaging service.

When it’s available, the downloading option will appear at the bottom of each user’s settings menu.

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, said it may take a several weeks, or even months, before everyone gets the feature.

After a records request is made, users will receive an email on how to download their personal archive.

For Twitter’s earliest users, the records date back to 2006 when Twitter started.

Twitter users already have been able to peruse their past tweets by navigating to their personal profile page.

But going that route is more cumbersome because it requires scrolling down a page that can sometimes be slow to display additional tweets.

The company said that users who download their entire histories should find it easier to search for particular tweets and organize the messages — by month, for example.

The new tool also should serve as a reminder that a copy of everything people have tweeted still resides on Twitter’s computers.

Other widely used services, such as Facebook’s popular social network, also have been creating digital portraits of people’s lives as more content gets posted on their sites.

Facebook gives its more