Library of Congress gets Twitter archives

WASHINGTON, April 15 (UPI) -- The Library of Congress in Washington says Twitter has donated its entire digital archive of public tweets.

Twitter is a social networking service that enables users to send and receive messages of up to 140 characters.

The company said it processes more than 50 million tweets per day from people around the world.

The Library said it expects to receive all the public tweets -- which number in the billions -- from the 2006 inception of the service to the present.

"The Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life," Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said in a statement Thursday. "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."

A few highlights of the donated material include the first tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Barack Obama's tweet about winning the election and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter, the Library said.

The announcement about the Twitter donation came coincidentally on the same day the Library's own Twitter feed crossed 50,000 followers.