Librarians of the Twitterverse by James Gleick | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Good luck to future Internet historians trying to reconstitute context in that collection of info items...

"Here in the twenty-first century, the Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot. The library embarked on this project in April 2010, when Jack Dorsey’s microblogging service was four years old, and four years of tweeting had produced 21 billion messages. Since then Twitter has grown, as these things do, and 21 billion tweets represents not much more than a month’s worth. As of December, the library had received 170 billion—each one a 140-character capsule garbed in metadata with the who-when-where."

Librarians of the Twitterverse by James Gleick | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books