What’s in a tweet’s metadata

There is talk of requiring Australian ISPs collect & store metadata as a user browses the net. Metadata can include a lot of information, for example this is what’s included in a single tweet:

• the main tweet object, including,
  • the contents of the tweet,
  • the location of the tweet was sent from,
  • the type of device used to send the tweet (phone, website, etc),
  • the time it was sent,
  • the ID of the tweet (from which its URL is implied),
• links, hashtags, photos and mentions,
  • mini-profiles of any one mentioned,
  • the URLs of the photos (so basically the content),
• places the tweet is associated with, and,
• the user’s profile
  • name,
  • lastest tweet,
  • profile photo, background and banner,
  • location.

I’m sure there is other data associated with each tweet, but that’s a quick walk through of the content available via the Twitter API. The metadata associated with a tweet demonstrates how metadata can mean more raw data than just the content alone.

I spent the weekend looking at Twitters API, for 11Mb of content I was collecting over 50Mb of metadata.