Summary
The article begins by talking about both what microblogging is, and what a few platforms for it are. It focuses primarily, in either an impressive guess or incredible foresight, on Twitter. At the time it was one of the largest microblogging platforms at less than 100,000 users. It explains The general idea of what microblogging is, that is small short posts which can be about anything, and why this is in and of itself a successful idea. Large blogs require more time to write and are more complex, where small short posts, like Twitter’s 140 characters, can be written quickly and give you an easy way to communicate small things. This in turn makes it appealing to people looking for a social quick fix. They then continue to detail what their research was, in essence attempting to learn something of what microblogging is all about, as well as the social connections created by it. It also attempts to analyze some factors which make social media, or at least Twitter, more attractive. It found for example that people living in large busy cities, such as Tokyo or New York, were a larger portion of early Twitter users. Various other trends also present themselves in their research. People who belong to a given ‘community’ on Twitter tend to either share hobbies, such as gaming or podcasting, or know each other in real life. As well, they have divided Twitter into people who are either part of a community, someone who gives out information, or someone who is looking for information. Most posts are also divided into a few categories such as conversations or just talking about your daily routine. Finally, they looked into the most likely things to be posted about, which is a list far too long to summarize well here. It is largely based around everyday life, with more specialized communities dealing with those topics are a more regular basis. For example, they talk about a Twitter user named Scobleizer who also runs a Tech Blog. Their Twitter is primarily used for more Tech based information.
Reflection
The article presents a lot of information, some of it seems like common sense to us now ten years later, but it was important thoughts at the time. Things like the fact that users may belong to multiple communities, or the fact that a user is far more likely to be friends with someone who they actually know, seems to make sense. That said, some of it might not have been necessarily known, if the service was adopted by a large number of people who often frequented online forums then perhaps they wouldn’t have necessarily known a large portion of their friends list. It is perhaps almost unfortunate that they didn’t delve more into the philosophy or design of why people want to microblog, as that would have been useful information in developing a project on Social Media, since the design is such a major portion of it. That said the information that people use something more with a sense of community, as well as generally like to talk about either what they like to do, or what they just do on a regular basis is extremely handy and is useful for thinking of a project. These, to be fair, aren’t necessarily surprising, but its important to have actual sources to back you up when This information becomes necessary. Overall a useful, though not particularly surprising article .
