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?
