Library of Congress to store all tweets since 2006?

One should never believe what one reads on Teh Internetz, but it would appear that the Library of Congress is going to store all twts, ever - including those drunken ones you did in January 2007 (Spotted by Kosso)

Wow - if this is public access by all to the whole twtbase, over the internet.......

More Later, as they say!

Update - More Now - from the Twitterblog:

It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is something we firmly believe and it has driven many of our decisions regarding openness. Today we are also excited to share the news that Google has created a wonderful new way to revisit tweets related to historic events. They call it Google Replay because it lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time.

Google Replay currently only goes back a few months but eventually it will reach back to the very first Tweets every created.

Result - bonanza for dataminers! As for your privacy, kiss it a fond goodbye.

OK, so would you have made half the tweets you did if you'd known it was all going to be totally public, searchable etc with very low transaction costs? Big lesson for Europeans using US services without a thought - they have different views on privacy, and the Data Prevention .

This, combined with that pesky spam advertising, will kill or cure Twitter.

My bet is on kill, but not before they have had a "liquidity event"