The library of congress is archiving billions of tweets.
400 million tweets are sent every day. Many heads of state have twitter accounts and even the Pope recently joined.
The United States Library of Congress is archiving messages from the social networking website Twitter.
A recent report noted that it has amassed an archive of 170 billion tweets, and the number is growing every day.
The Director of Communications at the Library of Congress named Gayle Osterberg wrote that “Twitter is a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress but an important one to its mission. As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing, and in some cases supplanting, letters, journals, serial publications and other sources routinely collected by research libraries."
Twitter was launched in 2006 to a slow start, only recruiting 5 thousand users in the first two months online.
Today there are hundreds of millions of Twitter users and accounts from all over the world.
What do you think? Should something like tweets be archived for future reference?
