Graphic detail | Digital verbosity

What's in a tweet

A tweet is much longer than 140 characters

By L.S. | LONDON

THE beauty of Twitter, the popular microblogging service, is that users have to keep it short: messages can only be 140 characters long. But companies that mine the stream of tweets for marketing and other purposes (see article in this week's issue of The Economist) get much more information. Below is a map of a tweet including all its metadata. The map was published by Raffi Krikorian, a developer at Twitter. It is 18 months old, but it is safe to say that the amount of metadata attached to a tweet has not decreased since.
Reuse this content

Searching for the Catholic church’s centre of gravity

How has its influence changed over time?

Tracking Donald Trump’s immigration policy in charts

And why that is increasingly hard to do

Which countries would benefit most from an American brain drain?

Our footloose index ranks the most attractive countries for graduates

What your boss makes of your apology

Does it win you favours or hold you back?

How “bloated” are governments really? 

Elon Musk’s DOGE should worry about more than just size 

Schooled by Trump, Americans are learning to dislike their allies

Our polling shows that Americans’ and Europeans’ attitudes towards each other are changing quickly