Info 202 Fall 2011

In his blog post about Twitter status objects, Raffi Krikorian, Director of Twitter's Application Services, breaks down the metadata stored in each and every tweet. This ties in with the concept of Linked Data and the Semantic Web championed by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues who envision a Web where any and all data is related and linked to each other using metadata. This vision would make it so that data on the Web can be programmaticaly found and related to each other. Krikorian's annotated map of a Twtter status object (pdf) in JSON lays out each and every piece of data associated with a single tweet including information about the author, geolocation data, language, and of course the 140 characters of a user's tweet. With more than 200 million Tweets being made everyday and rising, having such a robust and clear mapping of each tweet's metadata helps both Twitter and the rest of the online community link to, relate, and find relevant information easily.