The Library of Congress to archive all public Twitter feeds

The World

Earlier this week social media darling, Twitter, announced a plan to make money through internally generated ad revenue, by displaying “promoted tweets” when people search Twitter.com. (Google returns sponsored links in much the same way.) People have wondered for years how Twitter planned to make money, so the announcement made some waves. However, more historic news came yesterday, when the Library of Congress announced it would begin the process of archiving all the public tweets ever tweeted, going back to Twitter’s inception in 2006.

We turn to Adam Ostrow, Editor-in-Chief of Mashable.com, as well as Marilyn Johnson, author of the book “This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All,” Together they describe the potentially historic news, and what it means to immortalize such a vast digital record of everyday chatter.

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