Last week, Twitter and the Library of Congress announced a joint effort to archive every past, present and future tweet posted to the site in the name of posterity.
This is pretty good news - not just because my bad puns will be immortalised forever in the LOC archive, but because the Twitter medium is being recognised as an important change in how we communicate. It's a game changer in terms of its impact on social media, but it is also having an increasing impact on the traditional media. News stations often show feedback from Twitter, often having a dedicated account on the site - if only to share links to new stories.
I personally think this is a drop in the water. We're talking about a "sea" of information here, if you archive tweets only you lose the meaning behind many of them. Without the archival of popular news stories around the time, even a popular internet phenomenon to hit YouTube, the reactions contained within tweets often won't make sense.
Shortened links also fall into this trap - sure, you've got the obvious problem of a popular URL shortening service being lost along the way, but you've also got the problem of content not being available years, even months or days down the line, the Internet is such a fast paced medium. The Internet Archive will have archived some of the textual content being tweeted, but it is seemingly impossible (and an unappealing notion) to create a definitive archive of every single piece of content that has ever been made available on the internet.
Ignoring the technical and moral limitations in the sense that it would be costly in terms of storage and computational power and some people would find it intrusive to archive all of their content, regular snapshots of the content on the Internet would have to be made to make anything meaningful.
It's a nice start, but it will be in no way a full data set.
