Information overload. The phrase barely scratches the surface when it comes to the mass quantities of data available for gathering. Take the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, for example. In 2000, when the star survey project first took off, the New Mexico telescope had collected more data in its first few weeks than had ever been collected in the history of astronomy. Since that time, it has accumulated more than 140 terabytes of information.

And if that’s not enough to blow your mind, according to the Economist, Chili’s Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is predicted to draw in that much data every five days. But it’s not just the great expanse that holds an infinite amount of information. Even the retail world has mind-boggling amounts of data to collect.

“Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America's Library of Congress,” reports the Economist.

Regardless of the size of the business or the amount of information it takes in, it’s essential for retailers to remember that collecting the data is just the beginning of the process. It becomes big data when each piece of information is analyzed, sized up and put into context.

In the video above, IBM expert Jeff Jonas explains why data matters. What it equates to for retailers is that when individual transactions (individual pieces of data) are placed into the bigger picture, so much can be learned about consumers and their shopping habits.

For anyone who’s noticed the dog-eared “view summary” paper icon located at the bottom of a tweet, you’ve probably wondered how it got there and why it only appears on some status updates. The same goes for the staggered “view image” icon.

As it turns out, the expandable content is what Twitter refers to as a card, an added-value feature that makes it possible for Twitter users to attach additional media to their tweets. To include a card on a status update, it’s necessary to add a few lines of HTML to the web pages where the original content can be found.

Twitter rolled out its cards in mid-2012, initially delivering summary and image offerings. This week, however, the social media giant revealed three new cards – one of which that will have a substantial impact for online retailers active on Twitter.

“The product card is a great way to better represent retail items on Twitter, and to drive sales,” explains the Twitter development site. “This Card type is designed to showcase your products via an image, a description, and allow you to highlight two other key details about your product.”

The video above walks users through the process of adding Twitter cards that will appear every time a tweet references some aspect of their website. Currently, however, Twitter doesn’t allow for just anyone to use the product portion of the service. Businesses and individuals will need to apply for the ability to do so. In the meantime, the video does a good job of explaining how to add meta tags to tap into the pre-existing portion, which will be similar to the functionality of the product cards when they become available system-wide.