Twitter Chirp: Library of Congress to Preserve Every Tweet Ever Recorded

With 55 million new tweets every day, there is starting to be a need to preserve the increasing amount of data that Twitter generates. Now, you’re probably thinking that the vast majority of tweets can’t possibly be worth preserving, but it’s not just the value of the individual tweets that’s important, it’s the context they create.

As Twitter was wowing the audience at its Chirp developer conference, it also made another interesting announcement, all of the tweets ever made will be housed by the US Library of Congress, the largest library in the world.

“Recently, the Library of Congress signaled to us that the public tweets we have all been creating over the years are important and worthy of preservation. Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply,” Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, wrote.

“It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history,” he added.

There are a few things to note, though. The Library will only get the tweets that are six months or more older and, obviously, only the public ones, no private Twitter streams and definitely no direct messages. The data it receives can be used internally by the Library of Congress, for outside research, as long as it is non-commercial and, of course, for display in the Library itself.

The announcement will probably be more exciting to scientists rather than historians. While there is value in preserving the tweets, many will be very happy to be able to access Twitter’s entire archive to conduct any type of research. There have been plenty of interesting studies even with the limited access the Twitter API provides, so there should be a lot of valuable research coming out from now on.

Keeping with the historian theme, Google has also announced that it’s opening up the Twitter archives to searchers. Users can narrow a search to just a given timeframe enabling them to see how people reacted at a certain event or get the feel of the Twitter ecosystem at any point in time. For now, the archives only go back to February 2010, but Google says all the tweets will be searchable soon.


Other Twitter Chirp coverage:
- Twitter Has 106 Million Users
- Twitter Search Is Bigger than Yahoo and Bing Combined
- Twitter Ready to Take On Facebook Connect with @anywhere
- Places, Annotations, Twitter for Android and Twee.tt