Twitter is Archived….

“Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service?  Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.

That’s right.  Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.”

“Just a few examples of important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), 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 (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).”

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I thought this was a good comment:

1. Joshua Rogers April 16, 2010 at 1:05 amMost of the negative comments on here seem to be quite odd. It’s as though most people believe that removing a tweet actually removes all record of its existence. Google archives twitter, different websites aggregate tweets, tweets get retweeted or sent to cell phones. Once it’s out, it’s out.

   There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Showing anger at the Library of Congress for archiving tweets also shows a lack of understanding about how the internet works. Anyone requiring a warning that words can’t be unsaid should probably not be using such a service (or the internet as a whole.) When you distribute information (such as a tweet) you lose the ability to control it any further.

   Additionally, it might be worth mentioning that people probably shouldn’t tweet things that they don’t want others to see. I’d hoped that was obvious though.