Twitter’s Wormhole Week

[US Library of Congress]

Twitter has gone through a wormhole in the past ten days. It went in as an aging, fascinating startup and has emerged as something more enduring and important.

First, it first announced acquisition of Tweetie, a superb and popular Twitter client for the desktop and the iPhone. This required it to also announce a more mature platform strategy, which in turn caused consternation among many members of the developer community that has contributed  to the platform's success so far.

This all happened in the days leading up to Chirp,  Twitter's first-ever developer conference. Many developers went to the event expressing misgivings. Most came out still loyal and passionate to the evolving platform. Twitter's "secret" was to not be secretive.  Company spokespeople set a new standard for candor and transparency in their comments and quips from the conference dais.

The most discussed wormhole event was the launch of contextual tweet ads. Now when you search for a topic on Twitter, you will get a sponsored tweet in some returns. Like Google ads, they are contextual and unobtrusive. An interesting aspect is that if people do not retweet a sponsored post, then the sponsors are required to replace it with one more to the community's liking.

This, of course, caused some grumbling, but less than I would have thought. Observers have been unanimous that the company needed to introduce a serious monetization model and this one looks promising.

It could get muckier in the future, however. In the next phase, sponsored tweets will be inserted into user streams and we may not like that. But so far, Twitter has handled the issue with great sensitivity and I personally trust that they company will continue to do so.

My favorite Twitter wormhole week announcement was that Twitter has gifted its entire-four-year archives of billions of tweets, to the US Library of Congress [LC], America's largest library and official keeper of our national culture. This archives will continuously be updated, once tweets are six-months-old.

The LC is where serious historians and authors go to research books. It is the best way to see how people were in this country at earlier times.

Twitter is a wonderful record of what what everyday people did and said at any given time. For example, if you want to know what life was like on an Ohio farm in 1810, this is the building that stores the body of knowledge on that or any other such topic.

Twitter's inclusion means that what people say on this platform will be stored from this time forward for historians of the future to know we said on that space in this time and that give a continuity and a permanence to Twitter.

Although it has digitally expanded it's role and accessibility, the LC has traditionally been for  for scholarly research. You can't just drop in and thumb through Thomas Jefferson's personal diaries.

But Google will let you do that with the Twitter archives. The world's largest search company has announced it will make the Twitter archives searchable online and apparently has exclusive rights for now. There will be a six-month time lag before you can do this so searches will be historic rather than for finding out who became mayor of your local pizza joint yesterday.

If you read my books and blog posts regularly, you know that I am very interested in the continuity of human culture. I am fascinated with how much we people remain the same even as our communications tools get better, cheaper and faster.

To me the Twitter archives gives a sense of continuity and permanence that goes beyond anything I could have imagined.