A Peculiar Blog

Have you ever wondered what happens to those tweets that you so casually post on twitter?  Well, for one thing, twitter has a full archive of every tweet that’s ever been sent.

That’s reasonable of course since it’s their service.  The thing is though that each tweet gets it’s own permalink url, which means that Google and other search engines can and do crawl those links when they find ’em.  Which means that if somebody is searching for say hair loss treatment for women, they might easily find a link to tweets you’ve written about hair problems of whatever sort.

Now that information, every public tweet since March 2006, is going to be archived in another place, the library of congress.  It will also be used by researchers who will mine that giant database for who knows what purposes.

It’s been said many times before but I’ll say it again.

NEVER write something online that you would not want the whole world to know about!

[tags]twitter, library of congress, tweets, archive, data mining, research[/tags]