I am reminded of Google's acquisition of USENET archives and reposting of them as "google groups," indexed and searchable. It was a little shocking to find that posts you had assumed were going to a group at one time in a non-archived forum were now searchable, often times by your email address. On the other hand, my gut reaction to the Library of Congress archiving public Twitter posts is positive. The public twitter stream is of historical cultural significance and is an amazing repository of mundane moments in the daily lives of many people and records of what they thought important. It was initially posted in an architecture that was searchable and that displayed all public tweets in an ongoing stream. I think it's great that the Twitter stream will be preserved and curated by an institution which is not going to go out of business, or get bought and reinvented, or just reinvent itself and make it all go away. I recognize the privacy issues at stake, and think it's important to discuss them, but I'm fine with this. Nancy,
On Apr 14, 2010, at 6:13 PM, Michael Zimmer wrote:
For those who haven't already seen the news, the Library of Congress announced today that they are acquiring the entire archive of public Twitter activity since March 2006:
Library of Congress Announcement: How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive http://www.loc.gov/tweet/how-tweet-it-is.html
Twitter Announcement: Tweet Preservation http://blog.twitter.com/2010/04/tweet-preservation.html
And my initial probe of various open concerns: Open Questions about Library of Congress Archiving Twitter Streams
http://michaelzimmer.org/2010/04/14/open-questions-about-library-of-congress...