Archived Twitter?

The Library of Congress announced that it will be archiving all the tweets placed on the social network site since Twitter’s inception in March of 2006. According to the article by Dan Hope, there are 50 million tweets per day and the total number of tweets in the site’s four year history already numbers in the billions. The LoC says they are going to focus on tweets that have more of a milestone quality to them, such a Obama’s election win announcement, the first tweet from co-founder Jack Dorsey and a series of tweets that helped free a photojournalist from prison in Egypt. The other supposed benefit is the sociological insight.

I have to say I’m not real sure of the benefit of archiving all the tweets. Even the article admits that the significant tweets will outnumber the relevant ones. What I’ve noticed is that a lot of tweets are people sharing information by posting links to articles and other websites on the internet. Most significant tweets have a corresponding story on one of the major news sites. If the LoC wants to really archive something with a sociological insight, I say archive the blogs. That will obviously be harder to do since there are A LOT of blgos out there and the have been blogs for almost 10 years. The amount of data storage would need to be huge to do it, but I think it would give a better insight to our culture than the 140 character tweets.