Tweets to be archived by Library of Congress

In the “Now I have seen everything” department, the US Library of Congress announced a deal with Twitter to archive all public tweets, dating back to Twitter’s inception in March 2006.

From the Library of Congress’s blog:

Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. 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.

No one, Twitter nor the Library of Congress is talking about what they are going to do with the collection of 140 character messages once they have them, but No word yet on precisely what will be done with the collection, but the deal may improve access for researchers wanting to analyze and mine Twitter’s giant database.

So, be careful of what you tweet, its now all going to be archived for posterity. And now the old saying is true, nothing is ever deleted from the Internet.