8/31 Reading Reflection – Is it really about me?

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 “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” the content of messages posted on twitter from over 350 twitter users is analyzed and ran through human coding and quantitative analysis to try and give a deeper understanding to the users of Twitter. The analysis from the paper showed that there were two common types of user behavior when writing a message on Twitter: Those who mostly talked about themselves and their lives and those who mostly talked about and shared information on other things. Furthermore the paper found that users who shared information on things other than their own lives generally had more followers and were more active.

 

Reflection:

This paper is very similar to the previous one “Why we Twitter”. It differentiates somewhat in how they gather the user data and what they are looking for in the user activity. Interestingly, this paper decides that there are only two common types of user behavior where “Why we Twitter” thought there were three types of user intention. However, it could be argued that there is a difference between “behavior” and “intention”. Especially when the “user behavior” researched in this paper refers specifically to posted content and the “user intention” in “Why we Twitter” refers to activity on Twitter as a whole.

 

Questions:

  • What are some of the more uncommon user behaviors?
  • Which form of common user behavior would be more useful for what kinds of Twitter research?
  • Will there be more than two common user behaviors in the future?

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8/31 Reading Reflection – Why we Twitter

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?

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Reading Reflection 1

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.

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

The paper “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” studied and presented data that related to communities within twitter, how they interact with each other, the different types of users within those communities, and how those users spread and gather information through twitter.  They studied geographical distribution and user intention to conclude that the three kinds of user intentions are daily chatter, conversations, and reporting news.  They also concluded that the three user types are information sources, friends, and information seekers.

Similarly, “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams” studies and analyzed the data scraped from the twitter API to figure out the recent changes in communication and social interaction due to twitter and other social media sites.  They also found distinct differences in the different users of twitter, some being focused on sharing information and most being focused on themselves and their lives.  More informational users tend to be more active, talk more often with other users, and usually have more followers.

Reflection

Both of the above papers described and researched how twitter is changing the way that people communicate and the communities and networks that have been created by this new way of communicating.  Both of the papers did extensive and applicable research, and explaining their findings fairly well.  They both also gave good insight into the questions and problems presented in the abstracts.

Twitter is probably the social media site that I use the most, so I feel like I can relate to and understand a lot of the findings presented in both of the above research papers.  Generally, I feel like I am a mixture between a “friend” type user and an “information seeker” user.  I know of and follow a lot of accounts that are strictly “information seekers”, and, as the research suggests, those accounts are not nearly as active as others.   I would also like to know how common it is for users to classify themselves as “seekers” and “friends”, or other combinations of the different types of users.  The user intentions, however, are a bit more generalized than I would have expected.  From my experience, I have found that there are a lot more types of interactions, and I hope more extensive research can be done on the topic in the future.

I would like to see how this research has held up over the years and if it is still accurate.  From what I understand, twitter has recently made an effort to push current event stories on all types of users, even those who aren’t necessarily “information seekers”.  I would also like to see if the growth rates of twitter have remained constant throughout the history of the website.  I would also like to know how “retweeting” tweets relates to the different types of users and different types of intentions.

Questions

  • Generally, is the average twitter user connected to major current events in the world?  Trending pages on Twitter are now personalized, so it would be interesting to see how that has effected the spread of information.
  • My primary use of twitter is discussing popular culture and entertainment with my friends – it would be interesting to see how interactions within communities like mine usually go.
  • What is the future of twitter when it comes to information sharing?
  • Interestingly, neither of these papers discussed the spread of trends or hashtags on twitter.  How easily do these topics spread and why?
  • How has content creation on twitter changed and how will it change in the future?
  • User have changed over time, how has this effected the different types of intentions of the user base?

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Why We Twitter

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

In the paper “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, the author raises the question of why it is important to understand what microblogging is and how these tools are used. Twitter is described as one of the most common ways people microblog today, mainly due to its millions of users worldwide and ease of use. The paper primarily examines the characteristics of social activity and patterns of communication Twitter, an emerging class of communication systems categorized as “social awareness streams”. As described in the paper, system data and message content are both utilized from a plethora of users in order to provide a well-informed understanding of the activity of the users on the Twitter network. The author goes on to describe the research done on Twitter and what the user’s intentions are in using the site. It was discovered that users had four main intentions: daily chatter, conversations, sharing information, and reporting news. Furthermore, they found that users had three different roles: being an information source, information searcher, or as a friend.

Reflection

As an ex-Twitter user myself back in high school, it was no surprise to me that Twitter was the microblogging platform to be investigated. After all, it is home to millions of users ranging from casual joes to respected news networks. With such a big user base, there is clear value in researching it. With the ability to follow various sources and instant access to information worldwide, it is a very powerful platform for sharing and receiving live updates. However, with this ease of use and high visibility, also comes some negatives. Since some tweets are public and visible to everyone, this often opens a door open for argument. A clear example of this is in the political field, where opposing parties often argue with each other back and forth. Twitter has become so popular that even the President of the United States utilizes it to broadcast his thoughts (and inviting others unintentionally to voice their opinions as well). As described in the paper, the main intentions and roles of the user were what I expected as well. From my own previous experience, I found myself in each one of those roles at any given time. Since Twitter is described as an online news and social network service, these are the use cases where I see people accessing the social media platform for.

Questions

  • Why do many people utilize Twitter to receive their daily news rather than a typical news source platform?
  • Can the information from Twitter, sorted by hashtags, be used to predict events that have not happened yet?
  • With the vast amount of information posted on Twitter, what are possible use cases where machine learning can be implemented for research purposes?

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Reading Response 1

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 .

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first post

 

This study analyzes the complexity and psychological intricacies of user interaction on  FB. After interviewing 13 different FB users the researchers were able to categorize the platform as three different functional regions; performance, exhibition, and personal. They reached this conclusion after asking the FB users to review their profiles; reflecting on their current activity, privacy attitude, as well as other factors that can impact the user experience.

I found the section Tensions Between Public and Personal Regions very interesting because it is something I can relate to. To start off with, I mostly use FB for the messenger as its chat feature is more reliable than some carriage coverage. I don’t consider myself an avid FB user, I check it maybe a few times a day but I hardly post anything on it. Personally I don’t like to publicize personal details but lately I’ve been thinking that in the long term I’ll regret not being as active. For example FB has that feature that reminds one of old posts one made on that particular date. I was more active in HS than I am now so now that I’m in college I see old posts corresponding to that day. However, in my late 20’s if all I see still are posts I made in middle/high school it’ll be a little depressing.

I think I’ll begin to add photo albums of when I go on trips or short vacations because it gives my phone more memory but also because it’ll be nice to have an archive of photos to just look back on maybe 5,10, 20 years. Let’s say I run into an old friend at a pub, more often than not I won’t have my laptop with me but if we want revisit some moment I could log onto my FB and it’ll be there.

Another section in the study I found to be relatable was Exhibition: Managing Content. Right now, I’m struggling in terms of managing relevance. When I check on my FB feed I have friends getting married, buying homes, backpacking Europe, while my last post was about 2 years ago. Sometimes I feel that especially family back in Peru would like to know what I’m up to but part of me also finds it emotionally exhausting to reply to comments, which is why I like IG better. A picture and a caption is all I really need.

I never really thought about it but being a FB user has one subconsciously thinking of their long term image, as I have lately. At the same time, it’s a struggle because part of me doesn’t want to share those moments with the whole world because I want them to be intimate.

 

Why doesn’t FB provide functionality to stop altogether friend requests?

Why does FB allow people to explicitly view someone’s message?

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Reading Reflection 8/31 Mark Episcopo

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

In the article, “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, the author starts by explaining what micro-blogging is. Micro-blogging is “a form of blogging that lets you write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) about your life on the go and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging (IM), email or the web.”, Twitter is explained to be the most common way to micro-blog. Next, the author begins to discuss their research on the Twitter user’s intention in using the site. They begin by describing the origin of their data set. This data set comes from the public timelines of over 76,000 users. The next discussed topic is an analysis of Twitter itself. We get to see how while the growth of new users of the site has slowed, the number of posts has been increasing at a consistent rate. The users of Twitter are mainly concentrated in North America but there are also significant populations in Europe and Asia. Finally, the author gets to share the findings of their research. The data was shown to suggest that the main intentions of a Twitter user are as follows, daily chatter, conversations, sharing info/URLs, and reporting news. The main categories of a user are, information source, friends, or information seeker.

Reflection

In the beginning, I found it interesting that other micro-blogging sites existed, like Jaiku, and Pownce. I wonder what the difference in users is and why it is that Twitter became such a phenomenon as opposed to these other services. With how big Twitter has become I do see the value in researching it. The ability to instantly have access to the thoughts and opinions of millions of people all over the world is especially powerful, and brings with it unknown social ramifications, as well as opportunities for commerce and advertising. From what I have seen, having access to these highly visible opinions gets people angry and stirs up plenty of arguments, which is something humans weren’t exposed to as much before, until now. Twitter also could help companies perform market research in an easier way. I think more research these areas would have been a bit more interesting, as the results from studying the intentions of users pretty much turned out to be unsurprising. I expected to see all of those uses as that is how Twitter advertises its platform. However, I don’t think the creators of Twitter would have originally planned for it to be used as a news source, so that is nice to see confirmed by this study.  I did like to see the initial analysis of Twitter and its users, hopefully their further research brings out more information about micro-blogging.

Questions

  • Why are people so interested in reading about the daily routines and aspects of daily life of others? Or is it just that people are more interested in sharing their day than they are in reading about other people’s days?
  • What about Twitter makes it a good platform to get news as opposed to traditional sources?
  • Has the adoption of Twitter around the world (and partial regional isolation), created a social media culture gap, where people use the platform in different ways in other parts of the world?

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Reading Reflection 8/31

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.

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

In “Why we Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, the author raises the question of understanding why and how microblogging tools are used. In this paper, the data is analyzed by understanding user intent on Twitter and looking at the construction of social networks in respect to geography. Based on their analysis they found that users had these main intentions: daily chatter, conversations, sharing information, and reporting news. Additionally, they found users had three different main roles in different communities: information source, information searcher, and as a friend. Similar roles were also expressed in “Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams”, expressing that there are three types of user activities, “Information seeking, information sharing, and social activities”. However, this paper has a different focus on understanding trends within the messages themselves such as their content and what type of user they are called informers or meinformers. There are more meinformers than informers, but based on friends and follower numbers, informers are more well liked. Both papers help shape an idea that Twitter is a site used for quick expression of an idea, thought, or expression of a feeling, showing user do have a distinct behavior patterns and connections with one another that can be analyzed to see trends.

Reflection

Both of these papers provide an overview of what kind of data and correlations can be found from Tweets, which I find useful for gaining insight into Social Computing in general such as determining types of users, geographical connection between users, and the response of other socially based on types of users. They both came to conclusions about their original questions. However, I think providing options for possible applications for the conclusions could have been beneficial. Despite this, the papers did a good job at creating some further questions for more research based off topics covered in them.

I found the second paper about how users’ who are “me now” focused had less followers than informers, which makes sense, but I often feel the “me now” posted are created for the reason of getting attention from others. The data provided seemed to contradict the individual’s personal goal of receiving more attention, because it inherently makes them less attractive for others to follow. Therefore, it is is interesting to wonder why the individual continues to make “me now” posts if, based off this research, it is not accomplishing the task of bringing in more attention (or friends). Logically, if a user was a machine, it would notice this and switch to the informer role, but as humans, we struggle to reflect on ourselves and behaviours in such a way. This brings some curiosity in my mind on how we portray ourselves on social media in connection with what social media provides for us mentally and emotionally. I am not sure how that could be made quantifiable, but it’s an interesting question to me.

Questions

Some other research questions that I became curious about from these papers were:

Is there any connection to a change in language within a user’s tweeting from recent tweets the user was tagged in, celebrity following, or news following?  

For example: If User A follows Kim Kardashian, and Kim starts using the word “kitties” to express upset, will the user in the future start using that language as a result of following Kim? How much affect is there (if any) or correlation is your social media language based on others such as celebrities?

Do we see a trend that users in America don’t follow other users in foreign countries, but non-Americans follow more Americans? Does this mean the rest of the world is more in touch with American society than Americans are with other societies?

For example: The whole world was watching the last American election, but did American’s care about any other world elections?

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Guidelines for Reading Reflections

These are intended to facilitate and assess understanding of the reading materials. Reading reflections should be within one page (roughly within 600 words if you are using 12pt font). You won’t be penalized if you write more, but being succinct is another great writing skill which you should aim to cultivate in this course.

You do not need to summarize the full paper, but you need to reflect on what additional questions the work enables. Does this help you think about your next big project? What will that be? What other questions the paper makes you think? What else the paper is not answering or is concerning or is just intriguing?

Again this is an individual assignment and work submitted should be written solely by you. Most importantly, a reader while glancing at your reflection should be able to easily spot these questions. So use bold, italics, bullet points or other means of highlighting them. Here is a great example of a reflection written by my colleague, Prof. Kurt Luther.

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