If ever there were an unlikely partnership, it would be between Twitter and the Library of Congress. In 2010, however, they announced that, together, they would archive every tweet that had ever been and would ever be posted. The news was announced over Twitter with a simple Tweet: “Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive—ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.” It was a big task, but surely something the largest library in the world could handle, right?
It has been seven years since the announcement, but the Library of Congress still has yet to launch the archive of tweets. No schedule has been projected, no engineers have been hired, and no progress has been made. In the meantime, archivists and researchers still pay for a licensing fee in order to receive data from Twitter with the hopes of being able to sift through tweets to learn more about language and societal ideas. With an estimated 500 million tweets being sent into cyber space each day, it remains up in the air if the Library of Congress will ever be able to archive every single tweet. After all, when the deal was made between the two companies, only 55 million posts were being tweeted each day.
Twitter is one of the only social media sites willing to share their data in such a manner. It makes millions of dollars each year from selling such data, and researchers are confident that the continuation of shared data will help learn more about society. In just the first half of 2013, Twitter made $32 million licensing data to a variety of other companies. The Library of Congress continues to say that the Twitter archive project remains a priority for them, and they’re also trying to find the best way to update or revise data when tweets are deleted are accounts are made private.