Twitter is announcing several new and exciting things today at the  Twitter’s Chirp conference for developers. One of these is that the Library of Congress is acquiring, or archiving to be more precise all tweets posted on the Twitter public timeline starting from 2006.  This, according to the Twitter blog will be done because the Library of Congress deemed it worthy and useful for these tweets to be preserved.
So to show its support and cooperation to the Library of Congress’ invaluable work of preserving every bits of information important to America, Twitter is granting them access to the entire archive of public tweets – for preservation and research. Of course if you’re a heavy Twitter user, you’d know that lately tweets are becoming important part of the online news ecosystem and are becoming more useful than actual news reporting when communicating important events and most especially – emergencies and disasters.
Because of this, Twitter tweets are now part of the historical footprint that the Library of Congress must preserve and later on made available to researchers. Â However, there is some restrictions to this arrangement. Â Only after a six-month delay can the tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself and preservation.
This news runs in congruent with Google’s creation of  the Replay feature in search. Google Replay lets you take a look back into past tweets that were indexed by  Google which are crawled as results of your specific searches.
What’s interesting to find out after this has settled in is how Library of Congress will make these  tweets available for public consumption and whether making this happen warrants some privacy issues.
Originally posted on April 14, 2010 @ 4:15 pm