“Pop-up adds are the worst, on par with mosquitoes,” he tweets on June 17, 2012. There are lots of references to musicians like Chris Brown, Jay-Z and Michael Jackson television shows like “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones,” and movies like “Spider-Man” and “Finding Nemo.” He prattles away about Nutella and Frosted Flakes, complains about typos and losing his remote. Other posts pointed to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s growing interest in Islamic radicalism and possibly a dark subtext to the friendly, boy-next-door affect of Dzhokhar. Some details ratified the views of those former friends and neighbors who said they were utterly shocked at the brothers’ possible involvement in such a horrifying crime. These posts instantly became dots that people began trying to connect. There are more than a thousand messages on Dzhokhar’s Twitter account in addition to a profile page on VKontakte, a popular Russian social networking site, and in Tamerlan’s case, a list of favorite videos on YouTube and what appears to be an Amazon wish list belonging to him (Amazon would not confirm whose list it was, citing its privacy policy.) And once the search focused on Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers’ social media postings provided a rich vein of material to mine and sift. The Boston Marathon bombings quickly turned into an Internet mystery that sent a horde of amateur sleuths surging onto the Web in a search for clues to the suspects’ identity. It is America’s first fully interactive national tragedy of the social media age.

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