Friday, April 16, 2010

Twitter in the News

It was only fitting that in the middle of National Library Week, the Library of Congress would make such an announcement:

Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

Twitter itself also spread the news, and added this caveat:

It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will [sic] be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

If any of us would like to search Twitter public posts, how could we do that? Well, Google is providing a way, called Google Replay. With Replay, anyone can zoom in on a specific time period (like a month or day) and read what folks were tweeting about on a topic. Check the above link for more information and instructions.

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