(* Translations for the TI – “Twitter-impaired”: OMG: “Oh My God”;  GR8: “Great”; Twttr: “Twitter”; IC: “I see”; LOC: “Library of Congress”;  Itz: “It’s”; 4: “for”; Deets: “Details”;  TTYL: “Talk To You Later”; RLWNM: “Random Letters With No Meaning”)

In a critically important and bold act of government intervention, it was announced last week that the US Library of Congress (henceforth LOC) will soon be digitally archiving the entire collection of public tweets dating all the way back to Twitter’s inception in March 2006. How many tweets will that be? Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, many of which are vaguely intelligible, with the total to date numbering in the billions. It would take the average person reading 16 hours a day over six thousand years to read all the tweets posted to date or a long weekend to read all the ones having any remote historical significance.

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I was tweeting the other day – you know, on Twitter…. What, you are not familiar with Twitter? How about Facebook? No? Does “the Internet” ring a bell? Okay, in case you’re still living in that cave in Northern Afghanistan (or are my elderly mother) and you’re still not familiar with Twitter, it’s this web site where you can tell the world what you’re doing – so long as you can do it in 140 characters or less.  But, and this is key, your message must be of interest to absolutely NOBODY but yourself.
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