I doubt Twitter is going to share its database with anyone for free. Either way, it is still subject to the same rot everything else on the Net is (hardware failures, purged, deleted and reclaimed accounts, “private” data visibility, etc.)
Archaeologists sure have tools and methods to reconstruct life in Pompeii, but it's still nothing like real-life observation (and it citizens would probably prefer real-time seismic data to becoming a part of history, too).
No matter how “trending” some bustle is and how big the hubbub it generates (and how unbelievably important media want to present it), after a few weeks you can't practically “rewind” to it. Heck, you can't even find out what user wrote at some point in time! It's considered unimportant. Twitter may be praised for its countless virtues all the time, but, no matter what you do, single message's value rapidly declines to zero after a short period of time. You can organize them any way you want and post information as valuable as you can bring forth, it all returns to nothing. That's why I compared it to transport protocol: it knows nothing about the importance of of payload and doesn't interact with it, and delayed data is of little use.
…Who said “screenshots”? Seriously, no one would believe all the tech support stories about silly people sharing desktop screenshots in Word files would result in it becoming the acceptable way of spreading information in 2015.
A lot has already been written about global turn of the Web from more and more complex schemes of data organization to concept of mindless, useless infinite “stream” of half-finished minutiae (presented in pastel colors with rounded corners).
P.S. Of course, NSA seems to have the solution for this problem. I wonder if its data will be available sooner than in, say, 50 years GULAG prisoners waited to see their own cases declassified.
Archaeologists sure have tools and methods to reconstruct life in Pompeii, but it's still nothing like real-life observation (and it citizens would probably prefer real-time seismic data to becoming a part of history, too).
No matter how “trending” some bustle is and how big the hubbub it generates (and how unbelievably important media want to present it), after a few weeks you can't practically “rewind” to it. Heck, you can't even find out what user wrote at some point in time! It's considered unimportant. Twitter may be praised for its countless virtues all the time, but, no matter what you do, single message's value rapidly declines to zero after a short period of time. You can organize them any way you want and post information as valuable as you can bring forth, it all returns to nothing. That's why I compared it to transport protocol: it knows nothing about the importance of of payload and doesn't interact with it, and delayed data is of little use.
…Who said “screenshots”? Seriously, no one would believe all the tech support stories about silly people sharing desktop screenshots in Word files would result in it becoming the acceptable way of spreading information in 2015.
A lot has already been written about global turn of the Web from more and more complex schemes of data organization to concept of mindless, useless infinite “stream” of half-finished minutiae (presented in pastel colors with rounded corners).
P.S. Of course, NSA seems to have the solution for this problem. I wonder if its data will be available sooner than in, say, 50 years GULAG prisoners waited to see their own cases declassified.