Serendipity35

The Library of Congress is our oldest U.S. federal cultural institution and the largest library in the world. Their mission is research and it receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the United States.

And now, the Library of Congress wants to preserve the public tweets from Twitter. Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created - 55 million tweets a day and rising.

Yes, some are about significant global events around the world - the Iranian elections, earthquakes and other disasters come to mind. But there's also "A TiVo in my living room just made its little signature TiVo noise." and "Wow - Detroit airport is pretty snazzy!" and "I wonder if there is a professor of art history in all the land willing to say video games should not be considered art." - all of which popped up while I was writing this post. And those are from three intelligent and well known Twitter users.

So, Twitter has donated access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress (please don't tell me that's a big charitable tax deduction for them) for preservation and research.

By the way, 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. There's still time to delete that embarrassing tweet.