[Infowarrior] - Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress

[Richard Forno]

Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / April 14, 2010 9:03 AM / 2 Comments

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitters_entire_archive_headed_to_the_library_of_c.php

The US Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March, 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world.

The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research.

Will the archive include friend/follower connection data? Will it be usable for commercial purposes? Will there be a web interface for searching it and will that change the face of Twitter search for good? Is there any way that the much larger archive of Facebook data could be submitted to the same body for analysis of the same kind?

These kinds of large data sets are poised to become one of the most important resources the Internet creates. As Kenneth Cukier wrote in the Economist's recent Special Report on Big Data, "Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour."

There's no word from Twitter itself about this news but we expect details to become public during the Chirp developers conference starting in just a few minutes.

It's hard to imagine a more significant milepost in social media's early march toward becoming an essential component of our social experience.