15 April 2010 | Author: D. Warburton Search Copywriter

Historic public tweets archived by Congress

The Library of Congress has deemed the microblogging site Twitter a significant medium of public record, and announced that it will archive every public tweet made since the site's inception in July 2006.

In a blog post, the Library's Director of Communications, Matt Raymond, explained the federal institution's decision to place tweets made in the public sphere alongside other significant historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence. "I'm no PhD, but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data," he said.

Twitter's general counsel Alex MacGillivray told BBC News: "I think it shows the tweets are an interesting part of the historical record.

"This project however is not about us, it is about our users and the fact they use the service to chronicle these amazing events. President Obama actually tweeted after he was elected. That is a big deal and it's something he did.

"It is not something we imagined when we were forming the service."

With around 55 million tweets now sent every day, Twitter has been one of the major mediums for breaking news and events in recent years, covering everything from last year's Iranian elections to the Mumbai bombing, the Haiti earthquake and the death of Michael Jackson.

Simultaneous to this decision by Congress, Mountain View search giant Google has also outlined its plans to make the public Twitter archive easily searchable by users, with a timeline allowing them to track down and 'replay' tweets posted at certain day, hour or minute in time.

Google's product manager Dylan Casey stated: "This will be the first time the user will have the ability to go back in time and see the conversation about a particular topic.

"We think this is pretty significant because up until now the discussion has been about what is happening now and with today's replay button people will be able to go back and see what people were actually talking about around big events."

Google has already rolled out this feature to cover the last two months in Twitter history, but plans to extend it in the future to cover the entire history of the site.

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