By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably already seen this scroll down your Twitter feed: The Library of Congress will be saving your tweets. The library of tweets will be massive. Twitter now has 106 million users, who collectively send out about 55 million tweets a day, according to Marketwatch.

The first tweet will be from co-founder Jack Dorsey: “just setting up my twttr,” which was sent out on March 2006. It will take until the fall to gather up four years of tweets. Don’t worry about your tweets being saved instantaneously because it will take 6 months for your tweets to enter the library’s collection.

At first, it’s hard not to have a knee-jerk reaction to news that everything you’ve ever tweeted will be saved. But then you pause, and try not to think selfishly about this and consider what this means for history. For one thing, now we can record what celebrities had for lunch to more useful things like insights into the daily lives of politicians.

The Library of Congress’ blogger Matt Raymond writes:

I’m no Ph.D., but it boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data.  And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.

Just a few examples of important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).

And while The Library of Congress is hoarding all the tweets, Google will go ahead and give you a way to search them — that way you can create an instant replay of how people reacted to historical events. But don’t worry about all of your Facebook status updates being saved for all to see — there are just too many privacy loopholes to jump through to make Facebook part of public history.