Tweets for the ages in the Library of Congress

Your tweeted musings about dinner? Ashton Kutcher's tweet at 1:33 a.m., April 13, that he's "so proud of my wife"? The entire profane catalog of sh#tmydadsays? It's all now set for digital storage in the Library of Congress, a rich vein of anthropological material for future generations to ponder, assuming they haven't regressed to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The library notified the world of its new acquisition April 14, via, of course, a tweet that links to an official blog entry by Matt Raymond, the institution's director of communications. The number of maximum 140-character messages total in the billions, Raymond wrote.

Twitter, in its own blog post, said daily tweets amount to 55 million and the number is climbing. The library will continue to archive tweets, but will have access to them only after a six month delay from when they're sent, the blog states.

Google also unveiled that same day a search engine called Google Replay for the Twitter archive. The engine currently only goes back a few months, but it eventually will eventually search back to far-off days of 2006, when Twitter first launched.

"I'm no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data. And I'm certain we'll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive," Raymond wrote.

For more:
- read the Library of Congress blog post
- read Twitter's blog post
- re-live the moment with Google Replay

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