Library of Congress plans to archive all of your tweets!

2010-04-21

Library of Congress plans to archive all of your tweets!

Previous week brought an interesting announcement of the social portal Twitter and Library of Congress stating that each public message sent on the Twitter portal, starting from 2006, will be digitally archived. According to representatives of Library of Congress such a huge amount of data will not only present our current style of living in the future, but it also will be a very interesting data for investigation by contemporaty scientists.

Twitter is one of the biggest social portals, which gained its popularity thanks to microblogging – short text messages which can be send on your profile’s web page through the SMS, web browser or an application on your mobile phone. Each such a message is popularly called a “tweet”.

Currently Twitter has over 105 million of users, which send around 55 million of tweets daily. All of the messages that are public will be digitally archived by the Library of Congress.

Among most interesting and most important tweets one can find tweet created by Barack Obama after won elections or the one created by Mike Massimino – an astronaut sending the first tweet in the history from space.

Simultenously to the information about archiving tweets, Google announced that it will shortly make it possible for its users to search all of the public tweets with the possibility to filter them based on temporal and topic constraints.

In Poland exist several microblogging portals, including Blip, Flaker, Pinger and Spinacz. Will we reach the time when also Polish microblogs are archived…? Up to now Polish National Library is about to start archiving selected Internet materials and National Digital Archive has already started a beta version of a portal for archiving web pages of the most important statutory authorities (http://archiwuminternetu.nac.gov.pl/).