Though the slogan works for
marketing diamonds, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the Internet
is forever. Your LiveJournal from 2002 can still be found, and so can
the picture of you from that one night you can’t remember (even though
you took it off Facebook).
Now, every tweet ever made
public, starting with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet in 2006,
is subject to scrutiny by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Social Machines,
which aspires to have a better understanding of how information gets
disseminated through social media platforms like Twitter. The Wall Street Journal reports that
the university “plans to build data visualizations, mobile apps and
other tools to ‘create new forms of public communication and social
organization.
While nobody likes the idea of
the National Security Administration (NSA) tapping her cellphone or
looking at her browser history, it seems that Twitter is in favor of
allowing the estimated 6,000 tweets sent each second (or 500 million
tweets per day, according to Internet Live Stats)
to be shared with the university. In fact, Twitter committed to
contributing $10 million over the next five years to the project.
In addition to this partnership,
Twitter contributed money to six other institutions around the world —
including the University of East London in the United Kingdom and
Japan’s NICT — through the site’s #DataGrants program, which began in February.
On Twitter’s engineering blog, Mark Gillis wrote,
“This is an exciting step for all of us at Twitter as we continue to
develop new ways to support the research community … we remain committed
to making public Twitter data available to researchers, instructors and
students. We’ve already seen Twitter data being used in everything
from epidemiology to natural disaster response.”
Deb Roy, who is both the chief
media scientist at Twitter and an associate professor at MIT’s Media
Lab, said in a statement, “The Laboratory for Social Machines will
experiment in areas of public communication and social organization
where humans and machines collaborate on problems that can’t be solved
manually or through automation alone.”
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