Have you ever wondered what will happen to your tweets in Twitter? How they are archived and retrieved when needed, what is the underlying mechanism is used by Twitter to store your tweets???
Well here is the answer - tweets are serialized in a fairly unknown format called Protocol Buffers (never heard about it??? ;-))
Latest news from Twitter says - company is storing 12TB of data every day for later use.
With exponentially growing twitter accounts, storing tweets in the right format is so much essential.
Candidates for serializing tweets were very few - XML, JSON and CSV. But twitter trusted a relatively unknown format called Protocol Buffers, a format pioneered by Google.
Protocol Buffers, is an extensible protocol for serializing data, one Google claims is simpler than XML. And it can automate the process of recreating the data structures within applications. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the 'old' format. This automation feature would allow Twitter to spin up new features more quickly.
I found Protocol buffers very interesting. If you are also interested, then use this link to get more details - http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html
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