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?
