Wasted space

The ultimate narcissist’s dream has come true. The Library of Congress announced it will store each Twitter message since the Web site’s start in 2006.

Twitter is donating its extensive collection of tweets, which will be available on a six-month delay for scholarly use.

The sentiment is nice, giving the common person a place in history, but in reality, this endeavor will just save a lot of irrelevant information.

Twitter’s recent growth has been phenomenal, to say the least. Last March, 525,000 different people used the site. This March, 22 million users flooded Twitter with more than 50 million tweets per day.

What is the point of storing each and every tweet? Some historians argue this kind of database could provide important information on consumer and societal trends.

Really though, what kind of information can be gathered from a tweet that reads “OMG! I love Starbucks. Second latte of the day!” that cannot be obtained from a detailed financial report?

The best thing to come from this is the prospect that people might become more conscious of what they post online, but that is just being optimistic.

It is indeed significant that Twitter has been recognized as an important part of society, but the pointless chatter making up a large part of the millions of daily tweets is not.

— The Seattle Times