A “tweet” is a message on twitter.com, limited to 140 characters and referencing one idea, one piece of meaning. We can define the density of meaning in twitter messages by assuming that a tweet is always about 1 unique “thing”, and finding the average length of twitter messages. This will give us a new unit of measurement of the density of meaning in a body of text. Twitter messages can be a standard against which other texts are measured and compared for meaning density.  I propose that we name this unit of measurement the Tweet.

Shorter twitter messages will have a slightly higher Tweet value than longer twitter messages, but this variance might be fairly small. What might the Tweet value of a classical novel be? How about a scientific research paper? A political speech? 

This might be a fun project to work on. A bit of new software will be needed: first to find the average size of twitter messages and thus form a Tweet baseline, and then to analyze other publicly available texts in different genres to determine their Tweet value.

It would also be interesting to compare the Tweet density of public texts over time in similar genres so that we can see if, as a society, we are becoming more information-dense, or information-sparse. The difficulty here would be in finding a suitable basis for comparison. Certainly newspaper articles from 100 years ago and from today can be compared, but what about in other genres? What can we compare blog posts to? 

I hope to continue with this project in the future and come back with some numbers to present