Think those 140-character ideas you have will be forgotten? Think again--the Library of Congress on Wednesday announced that it will acquire and archive every public tweet--ever--starting from Twitter's inception in 2006. According to the Library's Facebook page, that's more than 50 million per day and billions in total.
In true Twitter fashion, the news came out via the @librarycongress feed: "Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive -- ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.."
In a blog post, Matt Raymond, the Library's director of communications, said that the scholarly and research implications of the collection are important. But a lot of what comes out in the Twitterverse is noise--what people ate for breakfast, for example--so sorting through the collection will be no small task. Of course what seems meaningless to us now probably can say a lot for future research, but it will be interesting to see how the archive is used and how long the Twitter craze lasts.
COMMENTS
Shouldn't they be working on all the other things they are so far behind on? There are important tapes of real historical significance that will be lost forever, instead of tweets. Even if this is a minor task as compared to the important archiving, it doesn't make for a very good impression for taxpayers.
Another FED 04/16/10 10:19 am ET
With all the ways Big Brother can keep tabs on people, this one might get people to actually start talking to one another again. I mean actual face to face conversations instead of putting something out through some kind of media or phone line that can be "archived for eternity".
FedEmployee 04/15/10 08:39 am ET