All Those 140-Character Twitter Messages Amount To Petabytes Of Data Every Year

Every day, Twitter users generate tons of data. According to the Technology Review Editors' Blog, all those 140-character messages "add up to 12 terabytes of data every day." "This wealth of data seems overwhelming but Twitter believes it contains a lot of insights that could be useful to it as a business," Erica Naone writes. So, what does the company do with all that information? According to the company's analytics lead, Kevin Weil, Twitter "tracks when users shift from posting infrequently to becoming regular participants, and looks for features that might have influenced the change." The company has determined that users who access the service from mobile devices typically become much more engaged with the site.