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.