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” talks about and studies what a microblog is, using twitter as a prime example, as well as various aspects of several communities that can be found on twitter. Some examples of these aspects included how they communicate to each other, how the information spreads between them, who accesses this information or contributes to it and why they do so. Using the collected data the paper concludes that their are three types of users as well as three intentions for the users. The three types of users are listed as: information sources, friends, and information seekers. The three types of user intentions are listed as: conversations, daily chatter and reporting news.
Reflection:
I was completely unaware that other micro-blogging sites existed like Pownce. I wonder what Twitter had that these sites didn’t that caused Twitter to take off, perhaps Twitter just got lucky. Either way now that twitter is so huge it would be very difficult to make a successful competitor. It makes sense to try and use a resource of millions of people sharing their thoughts to try and learn what people think about certain topics or what topics are popular. In fact, Twitter already does this itself in a way with it’s “trending” feature. Of course, more thorough researching for specific topics of interest would be more useful overall than the trending feature. I enjoyed the analysis of the different types of user types and user intentions.
Questions:
- Why did Twitter succeed where other micro-blogging sites like Pownce failed?
- What makes sharing your opinion online so attractive for many people?
- How accurate is news sharing on Twitter?
- Could an alternative micro-blogging site ever compete with Twitter?
