Want to have all of your tweets in the safety of your personal posession? Beginning today, Twitter users will be able to download their entire library of tweets dating back to their very first message.

The feature is being rolled out to a small percentage of users who are using the English language version of Twitter today. In the coming weeks it will be available to everyone. This writer has the feature available and is downloading his tweets now.

To see if the feature is available to you, visit Twitter.com and go to the Settings page. At the bottom is a section titled “Your Twitter Archive.” Upon clicking the “Request Your Archive” button, Twitter will begin creating your download. Below is a photo of what the downloaded archive looks like in a web browser. As you can see in a look at my archive, Twitter includes anything you’ve retweeted (like a photo of Barack Obama getting attacked by Spider-Man):

The purpose of downloading your tweets is left open-ended by Twitter. Most people really have no reason to. The primary goal, we believe, is to allow users to have their own copy of the content they’re writing on Twitter. We’ve played around with the archive and find it to be very easy to browse through tweets long ago. It’s leap years easier than continuing to scroll down your Twitter feed to load older and older tweets.

Facebook already offers a similar feature which allows you to download a wide range of data in one package including your friend list, photos, notes, events, and content on your wall.

If you want to have a second copy of your data, Twitter and Facebook’s archive features are the perfect way to grab everything.

For fun, here is my very first tweet: