(Credit: Twitter and Hugaholic)

Be careful what you tweet: Twitter has donated access to its entire archive of public posts to the US Library of Congress, all the way back to its March 2006 launch.

According to both parties, this arrangement is for the sake of posterity.

"Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world — from historic elections to devastating disasters," said Twitter in its blog announcement.

"It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It's very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history."

At last count, 55 million tweets were being posted daily worldwide, but the Library of Congress is confident that this gargantuan job is beneficial to history's annals.

"The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress," said Matt Raymond, the Library's director of communications.

"We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.

"In other words, if you're looking for a place where important historical and other information in digital form should be preserved for the long haul, we're it!"

Twitter did make sure, though, to mention restrictions placed around the Library's use of tweets. Tweets can only be used after a six-month delay, and direct personal messages will not be archived.

What do you think? Are you happy with your public posts about what you ate for lunch ending up in the US Library of Congress?