The Hidden Technology That Makes Twitter Huge

How did an unprofitable startup become a multibillion-dollar public company? By making sophistication look simple
Twitter started with a simple form and through tens of billions of repetitions became a network unto itselfIllustration by David Parkins

Bloomberg Terminal

Consider the tweet. It’s short—140 characters and done—but hardly simple. If you open one up and look inside, you’ll see a remarkable clockwork, with 31 publicly documented data fields. Why do these tweets, typically born of a stray impulse, need to carry all this data with them?