Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

In the paper “Why We Twitter” the authors look to understand the usage and connections amongst a set of users of twitter that range all around the world. They took a sample of 76,177 users from all around the world during the time frame of  April, 1st 2007 to May, 30th 2007. They want to look at the correlations of users between users that are closer to one another as opposed to farther apart. They also want to look at the behaviors of users that fall into the categories of “Information Source, Friend, or Information Seeker”. Information Source’s tend to have more followers but possibly not as many people they are following. They hold a sense of power because their words and posts reach a large group of people. Friends are users that use Twitter to keep up with their friends lives and their friends follow them back for similar reasons. Lastly Information Seekers tend to have fewer followers themselves but follow a large amount of users, seeking to know about a great many other users. The article also found that users posts fall into categories themselves, “Daily Chatter, Conversations, Sharing Information, and Reporting News”. Of these categories “Daily Chatter” by far outweighed the others in terms of post pertaining to it. Overall this article gives the reader a sense that Twitter users tend to follow other users closer to them and majority follow to learn about others lives. They will reciprocate and tell others about their lives as well.

In the paper “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams” the authors set out to look at and understand the main subject that twitter users tend to talk about with their posts. They split these subjects up into multiple categories that range from Information sharing to Anecdote(both for yourself and others). Specifically these categories look at if the information in the tweet is about yourself or others. Do you tend to share about yourself, your feelings, your life, your opinions. Or do you share information about others, events, world news, things that inform others about events that do not revolve around yourself. Through the observations and data analysis that the authors did they found that overwhelmingly most users tend to share things about themselves. Twitter users are predominately sharing events about their own lives. But this also shows that the few users that share about the events of the rest of the world tend to have more followers in total because they share information that a larger base of users want to hear about.

Reflection

I thoroughly enjoyed both of these articles because they both bring forward the large glaring detail that people love to share their own lives. The largest category of user of twitter from both articles is the friend user. The friend user is someone who follows their close set of friends and wants to keep track of their lives and whats going on but more importantly they want to share their life and the events that have happened to them with the people they care about. It really brings to light just how much of a social creature humans are. We crave to share our lives, feelings, opinions, and beliefs with others. We also want to know, know about the people we care about and keep track of what is going on in the world so that we can contribute to conversations amongst those people. This thirst for knowledge, be it intellectual or just plain gossip, is one of the key wants for humans as a whole. Through this exercise I have come to an interesting question, do humans crave this thirst for knowledge and to share their own lives out of a want to help others or simply fulfill a need we all feel? It is glaringly apparent from the data that twitter users are very focused on themselves. Sharing details about their own lives and opinions instead of sharing about the world as a whole. Does this mean that these microblogs could be encouraging people to focus solely on themselves and the image they present to others? Or are they helping the spread of information and making people more aware of the big picture?

Questions

• Do humans crave this thirst for knowledge and to share their own lives out of a want to help others or simply fulfill a need we all feel?
• Are microblogs encouraging people to focus more solely on themselves and the image they present to others?
• Are they helping the spread of information and making people more aware of the big picture?
• How much effect do the large twitter accounts with the most followers truly have?
• How much are cross cultural and continental connections affect cultures around the world through Twitter?
• Is this amount of information sharing too much? Could it be damaging to users instead of helping?

Read More

Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 29 Aug. 2017.

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 29 Aug. 2017.

Summary

“Is It Really About Me?” is an analytical research paper attempting to determine classifications of Twitter users. The classifications found were “Informers”, users who share a lot of non-personal information, and “Meformers”, users who share a lot of personal information. The researchers were able to cluster users into these groups with strong statistical significance. They did this by first breaking down user posts into different categories (Information Sharing, Me Now, Opinions / Complaints, Random Thoughts, etc.) and then clustering users based on number of occurrences of those categories of posts.

“Why We Twitter” is another analytical research paper with a broader goal of observing some topological and geographical aspects of Twitter as an example of microblogging. They showed special interest in the content shared by different communities and the inter/intra-community  connections and patterns. They found that North America (followed by other industrialized continents) is responsible for most Twitter activity. The also found that the content of posts changed through the week, with “school” and “work” being drowned out by “party” and “friends” approaching and during the weekend. The researchers found categories of user posts including: Daily Chatter, Conversations, Sharing Information, Reporting News. These resulted in classifications of users including: Information Source, Friends, and Information Seeker.

Reflection

It is interesting to note the similarities in analysis results and interpretation between the two studies, despite the difference and intentions and methods. Specifically, the categorization of posts leading to the classification of users. Both studies ended up picking out a similar “informer” class; “friends” and “meformers” seem to have largely the same posting habits; “Why We Twitter” put special emphasis on users who did not create much if any original content. It is fascinating to look at these studies and the patterns that they detected. Twitter is a great source of digital data produced by the living organisms that it is about.

Questions

• How else could user posts be categorized?
• Does the intention of a study have a strong effect on the interpretation of the data?
• What would the results of blind machine learning look like if it were also to categorize posts and classify users?

Read More

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 31 Aug. 2017.

Summary

In “Why we Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, the researchers explore microblogging sites, focusing on twitter in particular. They collected data on hubs and authorities, the impact of the geographical locations of users, and the relationships users form with other users. They looked at the motivation behind why people post. They researched who people followed based on their geographical location.

Overall they made some general conclusions. The people who communicate across the globe typically speak with other people who speak the same language. They found that there were 3 categories of relationships: information sharing, information seeking, and friendship. They found that the main reason people use Twitter is to post about their daily life activities.

 

Reflection

As someone who is not familiar with twitter I thought it was interesting that the most common thing people do is posting about the trivial things they do on a daily basis. I was also unaware that it’s used for information sharing. I find it surprising that people seek knowledge on microblogging websites where the user is so limited in how much they can write.

I wish the researchers had expanded a little more on their conclusion. They mention briefly at the end about how twitter should create more specific communities for family or co-workers but I think it would’ve been interesting to learn more about the relationships between the users in the different categories they established. Like why people feel the need to follow so many people when the relationship isn’t being reciprocated and how these relationships affect the user outside of twitter. For instance, do the people the user follows have an effect on the user’s own posts?

 

Questions

• What are the main types of information being shared in microblogging (i.e. gaming was mentioned)?
• What makes Twitter different than other microblogging websites?
• Other than a common language, are there other factors that determine friends/followers based on geographical location?
• Would doing a similar analysis on a non-microblogging website such as Facebook reveal drastically different results in terms of motivation for posting and relationships?
• What makes a user keep using Twitter once they start?

Read More

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

This article examines the premise behind why we use Twitter, but more broadly microblogging. It starts by defining the microblogging nature of Twitter and how it entices users with short posts that they feel they can create multiple times a day. This article also looks to understand the intentions of microblogging users and how relationships are built between them. It looks at the three main user intentions of users of Twitter (“information sharing, information seeking, and friendship-wise relationship”). These intentions differ for each user but are an important part of that user’s experience. This article proceeds to go into detail about the communities that can form from these microblogging applications. Interestingly enough, it examines how users with similar interests will share more about their “personal feeling and daily experience” with other users they have connected with who have similar interests. Along with this, we also examine the main user intentions on Twitter, such as daily chatter or reporting news, and why they may be appealing to different users.

 

Reflection

I greatly enjoyed the breadth of this article and how it started from the basics of microblogging and then dove into more intensive topics. This article discussed how users feel more inclined to post when using microblogging. I would definitely agree with this, as I have seen many people post simple sentences several times a day just to let their followers know what they are doing. This post could be as simple as saying they had just made it to work, but they desire to let their followers know about this. One thing I wish this article had expanded on more would be the “information seeking” user base of Twitter and the social implications of this user base. It would be very interesting to know more about the different users that populate the three user intention groups. Another thing this article has made me think about is the future of microblogging. We know that many years ago the social structure of how people communicated was much different than it is today. This begs the question of what the future of communication will look like as technology increases.

 

Questions

What causes some users to post numerous times a day on Twitter?

What causes some users to never post on Twitter, but simply browse?

Is there a correlation between number of posts and follower base?

Do users with more followers post differently than those with less?

Is microblogging too long for the future of communication?

 

Read More

Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

The author of this article talks about the study they conducted on 350 Twitter users and categorized the users’ posts. This allowed them to monitor the actions and behaviors of the users as well as the differences. They call this a “social awareness stream” (SAS) where they monitor social activity and detect patterns in activities of users. SAS takes in three factors including the public nature of connection, the brevity and the connection space of the information. Using this they were able to discover three activities that were predominant of users including information seeking, sharing, and social activity. They explained what kind of information they took in from the users and how they used that data to analyze the activity of the users. They tried to answer three main questions of common messages, differences between users in messages and content. This analysis helped them determine what kind of activity the majority of users focus on.

Reflection

This article helps me think about a few things about using social awareness streams as a tool. It is a powerful tool to understand the public user. When I interned at a big data company, they focused on creating actionable consumer intelligence by having select number of users monitored. This gave the company so much information from demographics to little actions the user would make. I believe with this data the developer/seller can know what his target audience is prioritizing. This article pointed out that from their analysis that the user focus was on their “self” more than “sharing”. This means twitter is an outlet for users to gain information for themselves. It is also used to hold onto relationships between users and create connections. This is important information that Twitter can use to implement new ideas and make their platform more user friendly.

Questions

What other areas did users focus on?

What other factors may be taken into consideration in SAS?

What other activities did users commit besides the major three?

Questions I can ask for my project

What is the focus of your users?

What questions do you need to ask to analyze your data?

What can you do with the information you gather?

What can you change to benefit the user using the platform?

Read More

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf.

Summary

The authors of “Why we Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” seek to explore a more in depth analysis of the way microblogging users interact with one another across the world, as well as the reasons for which they interact. Microblogging is a relatively new form of communication, where ideas are shared much more succinctly than traditional blogging or news printing. This form of online expression is a rapidly growing phenomenon and has tons of information just waiting to be analyzed. The first major topic covered in the article was an effort to find the correlation between users on the site that were acquaintances with one another, and those who were not. Using a node based algorithm, it was then determined that there was a high degree correlation and reciprocity, meaning that the number of users that have previously known one another was relatively high. One other discovery from this information was that new users who joined twitter were very likely to have been referred to by a friend of theirs, rather than discovering the site on their own. The next topic of discussion was how geography affected microblogging users globally. Despite only roughly half of the users in their data disclosing their actual location, it was found that Twitter was most popular in the United States, as well as Europe, with Asia as a close third. What this data was able to show was the relationship of friendships between two Twitter users, and their geographical location. In other words, the closer you were to one another, the more likely it is that you will be friends or follow that user. Similarly, those users who speak the same language are more likely to follow one another than those who do not. This stems off the same idea of the importance of geographical location.

Reflection

This paper was interesting because I have been a microblogging user for quite some time, however I never realized how much data there truly was to analyze. I think the authors compiled a well written article, and their points of focus were valid and showed true insight into how and why users interact with one another the way they do. That being said, I wish the article had gone more into depth about how geographical locations can affect the type of content being produced from the users in that area. More specifically, does geographical location have any relation to the ideas or messages that Twitter users are tweeting? Furthermore, the same analysis could be done for the language of the user.

Questions

Can we find a relationship between the topics of tweets based on geographical location?

Do major geographical locations across the globe discuss similar topics? I.E. are other countries discussing things that go on in the United States? Or do their intentions lie solely within their own country.

Are microblogging sites only popular and appealing to the younger generation, or is the age distribution of users even?

Can a user’s twitter data be used to determine their socioeconomic status?

Can a user’s twitter data be used to determine their personal interests, perhaps for companies to use in order to tailor advertisements in a region.

 

Read More

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Naaman, Mor, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

In the paper “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, the authors observe the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter to analyze the user intentions at a community level and show how relationships are formed over similar intentions. From their analysis, the authors found that there were 4 main types of user intentions; daily chatter, conversations, sharing information, and reporting news. Daily chatter was the most common type of user intention. Furthermore, they found that users play different roles in different communities. Additionally, 3 main categories of users were found: Information Source, Friends, and Information Seeker. Friends was the largest category. The paper concludes that a single user could have various roles depending on the community he or she is in; with most users using Twitter to discuss about their daily lives with others they have a relationship with.

In the paper “Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams”, the authors wanted to see what could be learned about user behavior on Twitter based off analysis of message content from Twitter users. To accomplish this, the authors gathered Twitter messages posted by a random sample of Twitter users and categorized the messages based off message content. There were 9 categories for the messages to fall under. Due to the short format and lack of context, messages were often assigned to more than just 1 category. The messages were also categorized based of the gender of the user and the type of application used to post the messages. From their coding, the authors split the studied users into two groups; “Informers” and “Meformers”. Informers are users, who post mainly information sharing based content, while Meformers are users, who post mainly about their current emotional state and recent activities. The authors suggest that Informers are more conversational than Meformers due to Informers posting more mentions and replies to other users as well as having more social contacts and social interaction.

Reflection

I do not have a Twitter account; however, I have been on the site before and am aware of the popularity of the site and the type of environment that is prevalent there. Both articles analyzed Twitter, although from different perspectives, they both found that most of users used Twitter to gain information, share information, or talk about themselves. Unsurprisingly, the largest category was users talking about themselves, whether it was about their day or how they are currently feeling. It was interesting how the second article, “Is it Really About Me?”, states that despite most users being Meformers, the Informers were more conversational. Usually, people post about themselves to get feedback or even validation from others, especially from people they would have relations with. However, it is possible that since Meformers are sharing personal information, they may be pickier about who can view this information while Informers are sharing more impersonal information and thus, may not care who views it as long as it’s being viewed. This also ties in with the results found in the first article, “Why We Twitter”, about how a single user may have multiple intentions or different roles in different communities.

Questions

• What aspects of Twitter makes it such a popular choice in comparison to other microblogging platforms?
• With the rise of digital journalism, would these information sharing Twitter accounts be considered reputable and would that be why information sharing and seeking are main user intentions?
• If users serve different roles depending on the community they are in, isn’t it possible that users would create multiple accounts for the various roles? If so, are those accounts seen as the same user or is each account is its own unique entity?
• Where public figures included in these experiments? Would they be considered as Informers or Meformers?
• What aspects does an Informer need to gain followers? Does frequency of posts and how active the account is affect the number of followers?

 

Read More

Works Cited

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

I analyzed the article “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. The purpose of the article was to first understand the purpose of microblogging, and how it differs from other forms of communication. Microblogging is defined as a form of blogging that lets you send updates to the public and friends about your life via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. This is different than blogging, because it provides a much faster and updated form of communication. The author describes the growth of Twitter, which initially expanded to 94,000 users just eight months after the launch. There are people from across the globe that use the microblogging site, but it is most popular in populated cities such as Tokyo, New York and San Francisco. The author notes that the number of new users has slowed down, while the number of daily posts has been consistent throughout the years. In order to resolve this, the author analyzes the user intentions of Twitter users. These include daily chatter, conversations, sharing information and reporting news. There are also many user roles, which include information source, friends and information seeker. Most people that use the microblogging site fall under many of these categories. While using the overall user intentions, we can infer the community intention. This is used to improve the microblogging site to gain more users.

Reflection

I found this article to be very interesting. As a frequent Twitter user, I had never heard of the others services Jaki and Pownce. It would be interesting to look into the correlation of the other services’ frequent user locations, and the differences between those services and Twitter. If those services have different features that make them popular in certain locations, somehow incorporating them into Twitter could make the platform much more successful. I think the idea of microblogging is fascinating; people can instantly update millions of followers with news, important information, what they’re doing with their life, and more. I believe this concept is just taking off. Years ago, we thought blogging and emailing was a fast way of communicating with people. With the way technology is changing, people will find new innovative ways to take microblogging to the next level, and to deliver information faster than ever before. When I use Twitter, I think I would fall into the category of “information seeker” and “friend”. I follow news sites, celebrities, friends, and informative sites to learn information about friends and what’s going on in the world. It’s very easy to find tweets about information you’re looking for. Twitter has a feature called “hashtag”, which produces a list of tweets that include the hashtag. It’s curious to see the what’s trending on the site, meaning that a majority of users are interested it. This information could be used to change the way Twitter presents its information. Twitter has a much larger pool of information than normal websites, because millions of people are contributing to it. It would be interesting to look into why people use microblogging so much frequently than other forms of communication. People can easily find information on news sites and text message to communicate with their friends. Why feel the need to share so much information in a short amount of time? The psychological reasons for it would be thought-provoking to research.

Questions

Why haven’t other microblogging sites been as successful as Twitter; what makes Twitter different?

Due to other countries’ cultures being diverse, do all countries have the same user roles and user intentions?

Are there other microblogging sites that are more popular in other countries? If so, how do they compare to Twitter?

Read More

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

“Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” discusses the use of Twitter as a popular microblogging website and the intent of use by its users. The paper addresses the utilization of blogs to “share daily experiences, opinions, and commentary.” In the past several years, the shift in popularity from blogs to microblogs has become evident. This is due to the convenience of microblogs – each microblog is typically less than 200 characters, thus users are able to spend less time and use less effort to write a post.

In order to determine the intent of users to use Twitter as a microblogging service, an analysis of aggregate behavior of users was performed. Using a HITS algorithm to determine hubs and authorities, communities and relationships were used to categorize intentions and types of users  as follows: information sharing (a source), information seeking (a seeker), and friendship-wise relationship (friends). Furthermore, these intentions could be described as daily chatter, conversations, sharing information, and reporting news. The authors also examine relationships between users, mainly that of mutual following (a bidirectional link where two users “follow” each other). This link displays that communities are built based on interests that are shared between users.

Reflection

This paper describes the concept of microblogging and answers the question of “Why do people use Twitter?” well. The details and description of blogging versus microblogging I found very compelling because I’ve used both tools before; in the past I had used blogging sites such as WordPress and Tumblr, but have grown to enjoy Twitter more due to the brevity of each post. I also found it intriguing how the conclusions of this paper (the three main intentions addressed above) can possibly be considered “obvious” to current users of Twitter in 2017 – we use Twitter to communicate with friends, to share information about our lives, to seek information in the world, etc. This is likely due to the increase in momentum of Twitter since the paper was written (i.e. Twitter has evolved and had an increase in its number of users since it has been available for 11 years as a microblog tool). Additionally, I think it would be interesting to perform another study on Twitter today to see if microblogging intentions are the same or different ten years later.

Questions

• Why is the user’s geographic location important? Is there a correlation between a user’s location and their intent to microblog?
• Do users of a certain geographic locations tweet more about specific topics than others? What topics and why?
• Why at the time was Twitter popular mainly popular in the U.S., Europe, and Asia? Also, why specifically New York, San Francisco, and Japan?
• Since this paper was written, have the main intentions of users changed?

Read More

Mor Naaman , Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities.” http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.

Summary

The paper “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” looks at the microblogging phenomenon. More specifically, it focuses on Twitter, one of many platforms containing microblogging content. Using Twitter’s API, the paper finds that Twitter is popular worldwide with most popularity in North America, and has interactions of users between different continents based on available user data. With some analysis, the paper categorizes main user intentions on Twitter as Daily Chatter, Conversations, Sharing information/URLs, and Reporting news. Similarly, the paper categorizes main users as Information Source, Friends, and Information Seeker. In addition, the paper states that a user may have many intentions and/or many roles in many communities. The paper indicates improvements and ideas for new features for user retention can be found through the knowledge of how and why users are using a platform.

The paper “Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams” also focuses on Twitter, an example of what the paper calls “social awareness streams.” Using data through Twitter’s API, the paper analyses the activity of users on Twitter to categorize Twitter messages by its content. The paper finds that a majority of users focuses on themselves, and the minority share information. Of the two, the users who share information are found to be more social.

Reflection

I do not use Twitter at all, but I can imagine how Twitter users can be categorized into the categories specified in the papers. I am more familiar with Snapchat, and I believe that it can be considered a microblogging platform. However, Snapchat is more focused on photos and videos with less text unlike Twitter. I can see Snapchat users and user intentions fitting into certain categories. For example, with the recent share URL feature on Snapchat it is more obvious some user intentions are to share information/urls.

The importance of understanding how and why users use a platform as discussed in the “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” paper can be seen in Snapchat. Many improvements and new features on Snapchat come from how users use Snapchat. For example, before, a snap could only contain one line of text, but users were able to get around it by pasting a text with multiple lines into the snap. Now, Snapchat allows snaps to have more than one line of text. Another example is how video snaps can only record for a certain amount of time. Often, users took multiple video snaps to capture a long moment. Now, Snapchat added a feature so that multiple video snaps can be recorded continuously.

Questions

• The “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” paper mentions continents interacting more with each other when the language is common, and the data supports that North America interacts less with others while others interact more with North America. Is this because English is learned in other continents, so other continents can interact with North America more easily?
• I understand why Snapchat is popular for updating daily activities since snaps disappear after 24 hours, but why do people use Twitter for daily activity updates?

 

Read More