Metadata in Twitter tweets

The Wall Street Journal Digits blog reports that there is more metadata in a Twitter tweet than there are characters.  Twitter is famous for its 140-character limit on tweet length; but in order to facilitate data-mining for companies that gather information from social media there are 150 separate points of metadata (information about the tweet) for each tweet, so each tweet can yield a wealth of information: "For a tweet, metadata includes a unique numerical ID attached to each tweet, as well as IDs for all the replies, favorites and retweets that it gets. It also includes a timestamp, a location stamp, the language, the date the account was created, the URL of the author if a website is referenced, the number of followers, and many other technical specifications that engineers can analyze." The blogpost includes a link to a map of all the metadata contained in a tweet.

hat tip: beSpacific