If you thought all that LOLing you and your friends are doing about Justin Bieber was just going to disappear into the ether, think again. The United States Library of Congress announced today that it will archive every single public post ever published on Twitter.com.
As library blogger Matt Raymond writes: "That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions."
Indeed, Biz Stone popped some eyes Wednesday with new user numbers at Twitter's Chirp developer conference:
- Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users.
- It gets 300,000 new users a day.
- It receives 180 Million Unique visitors a month. (Via Techcrunch)
What does the Library of Congress want with all your Tweets? As Raymond explains:
"Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.
"Just a few examples of important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election, and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter."
Earlier today Google also announced a new level of Twitter searchability on its developer blog:
"Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click 'Show options' on the search results page, then select 'Updates.' "
"For our initial release, you can explore tweets going back to February 11, 2010, and soon you’ll be able to go back as far as the very first tweet on March 21, 2006."
