Who said tweets are trivial?

[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/TECH/04/15/twitter.ads.wired/story.jpg caption="" width=300 height=169]

Gina Trapani
Special to CNN

Web sites come and go, but the short bursts of text you publish on one Web site in particular - Twitter.com –may end up having a longer shelf life than the company itself. The Library of Congress announced this week that it will archive the billions of tweets published since Twitter launched in March 2006.

Yes, that Twitter, the social networking site mocked and trash-talked in the press, late-night talk shows and by retro-minded pundits as 21st-century navel gazing for fidgeting geeks (David Letterman: "You know what it reminds me of? Oh yeah, a waste of time.")

But that's not the way the library sees it: If you use Twitter and your status updates are public, they should be in the archive. Twitter haters can go on scoffing that tweets are only ephemeral bits of frivolous information, but the Library of Congress has just ratified the importance of social media in recording history.

Keep reading...