One of the big headlines last week was the Library of Congress announcing that it would archive the entire history of tweets on Twitter. We had a robust discussion about it here on GovLoop sparked by a simple question from Harlan Wax “Really to What End?”.
I’d like to ask two more simple questions: “So What?” and “Now What?”
Having a bunch of data doesn’t do us much good if we can’t access and organize it. With that notion in mind, I have a potential answer.
The Library of Congress should run an apps contest, inviting developers to make it much easier to search, segment and publish tweets.
Some ideas to flesh out this vision:
1. Create a user-friendly interface that enables people to quickly search and find tweets based on any number of parameters – geography, hashtags, topics/subjects, time periods, etc.
2. Allow us to quickly flip the tweets in real chronological order.
3. Enable quick publishing of the search content into “digital books” – attractive HTML or PDF versions that retains formatting such as people’s Twitter photos – like TweetDoc, only with an unlimited number of tweets.
What would you add to the app requirements?
What do you think of the concept?