This raises the question – if we archive every single public tweet that crosses Twitter, are we truly preserving Twitter? The half-year window also offers sufficient time for major web archives to have indexed each linked page either through monitoring of the Twitter stream or through other mechanisms, including ordinary open web crawling. While some commercial Twitter streams, like GNIP’s Decahose product, perform full resolution of all short links, many library-based Twitter archiving initiatives rely on free Twitter API endpoints like the Streaming API. Of course, the real question here is what percentage of these links have been preserved by web archives. Yet, perhaps the biggest story is that web archives don’t appear to be indexing the links shared on Twitter through any of their other data sources, meaning that if they wish to preserve the web of outlinks from Twitter, archives have no choice but to monitor the Twitter API to compile those links.

Source: Forbes July 19, 2017 01:52 UTC