TMI: Library Of Congress To Archive Twitter

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HUFFINGTON POST: The US Library of Congress announced a major new acquisition: it will be obtaining all public tweets dating back to March 2006. Appropriately, the library spilled the news on Twitter via the official Library of Congress account (@LibraryCongress). The tweet read, “Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive — ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.” The Library of Congress directed users to its blog, which explained, “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.” “Expect to see an emphasis on the scholarly and research implications of the acquisition,” wrote Library of Congress blogger Matt Raymond. “I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.” While there’s no doubt tweets have made both news and history twitter-bird.thumbnail.png(here are some of the tweets that shook the world in recent years), the Library of Congress will also be archiving a good number of mundane tweets about our jogs and jobs, friends and family, check-ins and meals (people write about 55 million tweets a day). MORE

RELATED: Twitter, the net’s largest micro-publishing service, launched an advertising service Tuesday that will let advertisers — beginning with some of the world’s top brands such as Starbucks — have their tweets show up in the top of search results. It’s a first attempt by the service to make money from its users. Twitter’s ad model should sound familiar to net users, because it’s not unlike Google’s search ads — which let advertisers have links to their services and products show up above and beside search results. It’s not a bad model to work off, given those tiny ads propelled Google into one of the world’s top tech companies with enough global clout to even take on Microsoft and the Chinese government. MORE

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