This election has proven the value of old tweets; as one candidate in particular has a penchant for making shit up, and then pretending later he didn't make shit up.

That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and temporary medium, like a conversation rather than an article or book.

Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.

> Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.

Tweets contain photos, videos, gifs, etc. Text is far from the only things that would need to be stored.

How many tweets contain media? On my timeline it is a very, very small percentage.