The Library of Congress is going to archive โtweets.โ All of them:
Have you ever sent out a โtweetโ on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.
Thatโs right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitterโs inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. Thatโs a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.
We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. (By the way, out of sheer coincidence, the announcement comes on the same day our own number of feed-followers has surpassed 50,000. I love serendipity!)
We will also be putting out a press release later with even more details and quotes. Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition. Iโm no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And Iโm certain weโll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.





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