Thursday, April 15, 2010

Shoud there be a Dewey Decimal System for Twitter?

It's official, EVERY Tweet since Twitter's launch in 2006 has been recorded in the Library of Congress. Twitter decided to share its archive and as you can imagine, the number of tweets recorded is in the billions! The Library will record the tweets about every six months and with about 55 million Tweets coming into Twitter everyday, that's enough recording to make anyone's head spin.

Let's think about this, why would the Library of Congress want to store a pop culture icon of social media in the midst of thousands of historic pieces of literature? If you think about it like this, Twitter has been revolutionary in the way we share information. Twitter has been able to let us communicate live about some of the most historic events since its launch in 2006. Twitter has been able to capture moments like Obama winning the presidency or the Haiti earthquake, which have effected all of our lives in one way or another. Not only is Twitter just a social networking site, but buried beneath the tweets about your disgusting ex-boyfriend, there are tweets that are of value in our history.

However not ALL tweets are housed in the Library, if your tweets are protected, then they will stay that way. Also, if your tweet is going to be stored forever in such a renowned location, maybe people will think twice about their tweets sharing TMI..probably not, but wouldn't that be nice?

1 comment:

  1. I remember when I first heard about Twitter. I'm pretty sure I said "Tweeting?! What is the big deal about posting your status?" Twitter seemed like a outlet to post your online status like Facebook does.I felt that to be worthless. Now that Twitter has evolved into the one of the most popular social media site, I stand corrected. Twitter is not status updates, it is a way of communication to million of people, some of these people being very important like Courtney said. Our tweets are becoming apart of history. I never thought I would say, "This Tweet will go down in History" haha

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