From the Twitterverse

A couple of Chronicle articles catch the eye this week. The first one is about the future of archiving social media, thinking first of the great Library of Congress project with Twitter generally and of the Iranian revolution specifically. Interesting read, and one very telling passage:

Web users have voiced concern that their personal online footprints will be kept open for all to see in perpetuity. As much fun as, say, that drunken tweet from your weekend in Vegas may have been at the time, you may not want a possible employer reading through your indiscretions on the Library of Congress Web site in a few years. The solution may be keeping archives "dark"—that is, restricting archive access to researchers or sealing the records for a set amount of time.

First, you just better assume that your life in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas anymore, it will live in some form of perpetuity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. Second, the idea of an arbitrary "dark" gives me a creepy non-FOI feel, or worse, access for those that know how to work (even more worse, can afford to) the system.

The next article was more about professor's use of Twitter, and had some of the usual stereotype comments about the lack of teens and college age using Twitter versus Facebook until the very bottom:

“Now I hear students say, 'Facebook is where I go to socialize, and Twitter is where I go to work,'” Mr. Junco says.

Bingo. Twitter is real-time reporting, just like CoverItLive (kind of), SMS text-messaging (exactly, but costly) or any future short-form burst of info system. Facebook is the social aspect -- Twitter is news.