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Library of Congress To Receive Entire Twitter Archive

Posted by samzenpus on from the that's-a-lot-more-than-144-characters dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents. 'We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public,' said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information."

12 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Even deleted ones? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I deleted my Twitter account and it's been 30 days. Does Twitter still keep those tweets for posterity on their servers through some manner of legal acrobatics?

    1. Re:Even deleted ones? by Shoe+Puppet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I stopped selling the book I wrote and it's been 30 days. May the world still have copies of it through some manner of legal acrobatics?

      Once you have published something, you cannot expect to be able to pull it back.

      --
      (+1, Disagree)
    2. Re:Even deleted ones? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Twitter says they're going to delete it after thirty days. There's a marked difference between 'delete' and 'archive'. I have no issue if someone cut and pasted the last 3200 tweets from my Twitter account but the fact Twitter says they'll delete the tweets, not archive them, is deceptive.

  2. Oh great... by BlastfireRS · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...now the inane mumblings and poor grammar of the Twitter Age will be remembered throughout history. I was kinda hoping we'd eventually be able to forget all of this ever happened.

  3. Pooping by stevegee58 · · Score: 5, Funny

    All my pooping tweets preserved for all posteriority. (intentional misspelling)

  4. Re:Any from anyone? by Baloroth · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why? Anyone who made a public tweet with the expectancy of being able to retain some control over it is, well, a moron... oh wait nevermind. You're probably right.

    --
    "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
  5. Re:yes, but... by TheSpoom · · Score: 4, Interesting

    By itself probably a lot, but remember it's mostly text. They'll be able to compress the hell out of it.

    --
    It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
    - E. Debs
  6. Results are in by mr1911 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Researchers will be able to look at the Twitter archive as a complete set of data, which they could then data-mine for interesting information.

    Nothing interesting was found.

    --
    This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
    Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
  7. Time to put on my tinfoil hat by davesque · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've thus far stayed out of the privacy debate, but this is starting to scare me. Where is our right to oblivion, as Jeffrey Rosen put it (see this article). We call it a right because it represents a fundamental part of the human psyche. Thusly, we can either adapt our system to account for it or face the consequences later when the system breaks down. I have to put in a dissenting vote for this idea.

  8. Re:How big? by Amouth · · Score: 4, Funny

    well now that the Twitter archive is part of the Library of Congress it can only reflected as a portion of the Library of Congress.

    --
    '...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
  9. Old News by Dan541 · · Score: 4, Informative

    This happened more than a year ago!!!!!
    http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/

    --
    An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
  10. Re:yes, but... by Sooner+Boomer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hopefully they compress it down to 1 bit.

    And the value of that bit is "0".

    --
    Chaos maximizes locally around me.