Twitter Donates Archive to Library of Congress

Twitter, a social networking site that lets users send and read messages (called "tweets") of up to 140 characters, is donating it's entire public archive to the Library of Congress (LOC). This amounts to billions of tweets that have been sent from Twitter's inception in 2006 to the present. "The Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. "This information provides detailed evidence about how technology based social networks form and evolve over time. The collection also documents a remarkable range of social trends. Anyone who wants to understand how an ever-broadening public is using social media to engage in an ongoing debate regarding social and cultural issues will have need of this material."

Twitter and other social media sites can impact the intellectual property of businesses as well as their marketing strategies, as discussed by Senniger Powers attorney William O'Neill in the St. Louis Business Journal and Springfield Business Journal.

Over 50 million tweets are processed each day. Senniger Powers regularly posts news and announcements on Twitter.

The full text of LOC's Twitter announcement is here.