Library of Congress Archiving Every Twitter Entry

[exfileme]

Watch what you say on Twitter... it may last forever.

Library of Congress Archiving Every Twitter Entry : Read more

 

[sliem]

What a waste.

 

[gayan]

errrrrrrrrr.......and the purpose of all this is?

 

[aletoil]

Spectacular waste of space, but I do see the idea behind it. Think of it as a cyber time capsule. I would imagine someone in the future will be interested in the admittedly unspectacular things we have floating in pop culture.

 

[zeuss]

167 TB's of website data is impressive...


Twitter... not so much.

 

[godnodog]

Great, useless information (if we can call it that) to annoy future generations in their queries

 

[tpi2007]

Tax payer money going into important tweets I'm ok with, now as for those TMI (too much information) ones, it makes no sense. Leave that to social magazines which will do a very good job of archiving "the breakup of Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, and other significant global events." (the way this phrase is written leads to believe the writer thinks that Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy breaking up is significant global event...)

 

[micr0be]

someday ppl will go to that museum of the world's largest archive, and realize how stupid the world was back then ...

 

[domenic]

Have they (Library of Congress) created the perfect internet library yet? Have they run out of all existing media to digitize? -- And all they have left is tweets? BTW, what is the current US national debt?

 

[hameem]

"It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research,"

Awesome!! they will research on how someone broke up!! errrr.... Cool

 

[LORD_ORION]

Because the world will end in 2012, and they want to leave a monument about humanity (and how stupid it was) for others that find this planet.

 

[gekko668]

This is a load of bull. They want to store the tweets and and sugar coated the news as they are doing the noble thing.

 

[domenic]

I think it's just a bunch of bureaucrats trying to line their pockets - applying for government funding to do this crap. "The President Tweets -- It MUST be important!"

 

[mavanhel]

[citation][nom]gekko668[/nom]This is a load of bull. They want to store the tweets and and sugar coated the news as they are doing the noble thing.[/citation]
This is possibly a noble thing. Once something is on the internet, it can never be fully removed (isn't that one of the laws?). Also, this will give great opportunities to research our culture, why we're so addicted to social networking, and also the evolution of society as a whole, based on the commonpersons thoughts. As long as the information is public and not just horded by the US government I am all in favour of this.

 

[hellwig]

Heard about this yesterday. Talk about worthless effort. But then again, I think many people would consider most of what the Library of Congress archives "worthless". If someones wants to store old Playboy mags, Tweets, Beatles Albums, etc.. that's fine, but when they want to do it with my money, that's a problem.

Historical value my eye. The Library of congress should archive things that would be tragic if lost (i.e. original works of the founding fathers), not something worthless like Tweets. Tweets aren't in danger, they will only disappear when the world stops caring about Twitter anyway, so why bother archiving them once no one cares anymore?

 

[phatboe]

wouldn't it be better to archive the NY times, CNN.com or some other reputable news source than some random internet dude who may be twitering about his sore thumb.

 

[lowguppy]

Its going to suck being a historian doing research on our time period.

 

[Marco925]

[citation][nom]phatboe[/nom]wouldn't it be better to archive the NY times, CNN.com or some other reputable news source than some random internet dude who may be twitering about his sore thumb.[/citation]

Hey, that thumb is important, Forget North Korea, They may be on to something here

(Jokes)

 

[greatsaltedone]

Apparently many of you havn't heard of primary documents. Twitter is a history researchers dream come true. As they said, it documents events as they happen and reflects people's reactions to them. Hats off to the Library of Congress for realized what an important resource tweets will be for future generations.

 

[cichy69]

hoarding much??