8.1 Users and statuses

As users interact with Twitter, two types of objects hold the most important information: users and status messages. User objects hold basic identity information, as well as aggregate data about the number of followers, number of status messages posted, and more. The user objects are important because they’re the starting point for every other kind of data that’s available or interesting. Status messages are also important because they’re how individuals express themselves and interact with each other, and are the true content of social networks.

In this section, we’ll talk about what data will be stored in the user and status message objects and how we’ll store them. We’ll also look at a function to create a new user.

Our first step is to define and create the structure for a user.