Today in your taxes at work: Saving every tweet?
Library of Congress: We’re archiving every tweet ever made
Get ready for fame, tweeters of the world: the Library of Congress is archiving for posterity every public tweet made since the service went live back in 2006. Every. Single. Tweet.
The LOC announced the news, appropriately enough, on Twitter. Twitter isn’t just about being pretentious and notifying the world about the contents of your lunch (though it’s about those things too).
Matt Raymond, one the Library’s official bloggers, notes that “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.”
But even those billions of other tweets and retweets, the ones about how you just got back from the worlds’ most epic jog or how you’re sick at home with the crocodile flu or how your crappy Internet connection just went down again and you can’t take it any more–those matter too. </em>
Wow, an agency of the federal government archiving every Twitter message for all eternity? Gee, what’s wrong with that scenario…not to mention the outlandish waste of money.
