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Why Your Tweet Contains Far More than 140 Characters

by Caleb Johnson on April 23, 2010 at 08:23 AM

twitter breakdown

When you send a tweet, you're saying a lot more than just what's written in the body of text. According to ReadWriteWeb, each 140-character message you send contains a ton of metadata, or information. Each tweet contains the time it was sent, your username, your location, the timezone from which you tweet, your number of followers, whether or not your account is protected, your account's URL and on and on. To highlight this, Raffi Krikorian, a developer on Twitter's API/Platform team, broke down all the data contained in a single tweet and posted it on his blog over the weekend. You can explore Krikorian's entire anatomy of a tweet after the break.

Before you freak out and delete your Twitter account, there's a reason for this data. Third-party developers use it to build tools or applications on Twitter. Expect the amount of data to increase soon, too, since Twitter has announced that developers can embed their own data within a tweet, meaning we could soon do things like share photos and music, or tag our tweets. [From: ReadWriteWeb, via: NBC Bay Area]

Tags: data, developer, metadata, microblogging, privacy, SocialNetworking, top, twitter, web

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