Ars Technica reports: The Library of Congress is archiving for posterity every public tweet made since the service went live back in 2006. Every. Single. Tweet.
The LOC announced the news, appropriately enough, on Twitter. Twitter isn’t just about being pretentious and notifying the world about the contents of your lunch (though it’s about those things too).
Matt Raymond, one the Library’s official bloggers, notes that “important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election, and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter.”
But even those billions of other tweets and retweets, the ones about how you just got back from the worlds’ most epic jog or how you’re sick at home with the crocodile flu or how your crappy Internet connection just went down again and you can’t take it any more—those matter too.
Try the blog (it was down when I tried); the LOC says on Twitter:
” Sorry, LOC blog having some disruptions. Twitter acquisition story also on Facebook” about 1 hour ago via web.
The New York Times weighs in on Twitter on LOC.
Ars Technica reports: The Library of Congress is archiving for posterity every public tweet made since the service went live back in 2006. Every. Single. Tweet.
The LOC announced the news, appropriately enough, on Twitter. Twitter isn’t just about being pretentious and notifying the world about the contents of your lunch (though it’s about those things too).
Matt Raymond, one the Library’s official bloggers, notes that “important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election, and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter.”
But even those billions of other tweets and retweets, the ones about how you just got back from the worlds’ most epic jog or how you’re sick at home with the crocodile flu or how your crappy Internet connection just went down again and you can’t take it any more—those matter too.
Try the blog (it was down when I tried); the LOC says on Twitter:
” Sorry, LOC blog having some disruptions. Twitter acquisition story also on Facebook” about 1 hour ago via web.
The New York Times weighs in on Twitter on LOC.
UPDATE: It’s working at the moment…and check out Twitter’s blog too.
why
why why why why?
You never heard that refrain from that one Coulton song?
“…Aperture Science…we do what we must because we can…”
________________________
Stephen Michael Kellat, MSLS
PGP KeyID: DC5A625B
Because someone might need
Because someone might need it. Most archives of information do not have a defined purpose up front it is years or even decades before the value is known.
it’s popular,
and it doesn’t take up much space.