Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress

The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world.

The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization's offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big.

For now there are more questions than answers with regards to this Library of Congress Twitter news.

Will the archive include friend/follower connection data? Will it be usable for commercial purposes?

Will there be a Web interface for searching it, and will that change the face of Twitter search for good?

Is there any way that the much larger archive of Facebook data could be submitted to the same body for analysis of the same kind?