Every Tweet Will Be Archived

All your tweets are belong to us.

Under a program initiated by Twitter and the Library Of Congress 170 Billion Tweets have been archived:

The Library of Congress announced Friday that it is just weeks away from completing its archive of all public tweets from Twitter’s launch in 2006 through 2010, but there are technology challenges that need to be figured out before the archive becomes usable.

So far, the national library has compiled a massive collection of about 170 billion tweets from that time period, and expects to finish with this stage of the archive by the end of January. The volume of tweets collected into the archive on a daily basis has grown exponentially from 140 million in early 2011 to 500 million as of October, 2012…

[T]he Library has received hundreds of inquiries from researchers around the world interested in accessing all that data, but it must first contend with the technological challenges that come with building and managing such a massive digital archive.

This project is kind of interesting when compared to Twitter’s reluctant compliance with a judge’s order to turn over deleted Tweets from an Occupy Wall Street protester. Or are deleted tweets not included in the archive? Though how would you know when it is too late to delete a tweet because it was already archived?

I’m sure “researchers” of all kinds will be asking to see the new Library Of Congress archive.