Library of Congress Twitter Collection: 170 Billion Tweets Strong

When future generations look back to get a general sense of the zeitgeist from the past six years or so, they'll have plenty of digital information to look at – it'll just be limited to 140 characters or less.
At least, that's the premise put forth by the "Twitter collection" at the Library of Congress. If you've been curious about how much data the Library has amassed as part of its plan to archive all public tweets, first announced in April 2010, the Library has a pretty beefy number that it's now able to announce: 170 billion tweets.
Just to put that number into a bit of perspective, the Library received around 140 million tweets for archiving – each day – in Feb. 2011. The pipe expanded to approximately half a billion daily tweets by Oct. 2012, and it stands to reason that the Library will likely be processing...