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.