Tweets alongside treasures

Those who champion Twitter and the practice of notifying people about the mundane details of their lives now have two huge allies: the Library of Congress and Google. Both entities announced unrelated efforts to archive the 140-character thoughts posted publicly on Twitter, even some of the ones saying nothing more than “on the toilet.”

LOC blogger Matt Raymond remarked that Twitter is a “wealth of data” and that several historical moments can be found on the site.

It’s unclear exactly how and what will be saved. The Library stands to acquire all public tweets after March 2006, but Twitter users write about 55 million entries every day. That’s going to be a lot of hard drives filled with mostly pointless stuff.

Maybe in the future we’ll have quantum computers capable of sifting through the endless sea that the Library of Congress wishes to archive.

Until then, it’s unlikely the tweets will reveal much more about the cultural zeitgeist than the current trending topics system does. Even so, it’s better for us to archive something trivial rather than risk losing information we might consider important later on.

It will be interesting to see if anyone changes their Twitter habits knowing a future-man in the year 3000 might be reading them.

Google’s attempt to allow easier searches of the site is definitely welcome. Twitter’s current search system is woefully lacking, as many trending topics disappear into the ether after a few weeks.

Google also plans to allow people to hone in on a date and to view messages from multiple social-networking sites flowing together. This seems best for sitting in front of your computer, strapping your eyeballs open and recreating the rehabilitation scene from Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.”

It’s great to have the information available digitally. We just feel sorry for that poor LOC intern who will have to spend his or her summer sorting through tweets about Justin Bieber.