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” discusses the use of Twitter as a popular microblogging website and the intent of use by its users. The paper addresses the utilization of blogs to “share daily experiences, opinions, and commentary.” In the past several years, the shift in popularity from blogs to microblogs has become evident. This is due to the convenience of microblogs – each microblog is typically less than 200 characters, thus users are able to spend less time and use less effort to write a post.
In order to determine the intent of users to use Twitter as a microblogging service, an analysis of aggregate behavior of users was performed. Using a HITS algorithm to determine hubs and authorities, communities and relationships were used to categorize intentions and types of users as follows: information sharing (a source), information seeking (a seeker), and friendship-wise relationship (friends). Furthermore, these intentions could be described as daily chatter, conversations, sharing information, and reporting news. The authors also examine relationships between users, mainly that of mutual following (a bidirectional link where two users “follow” each other). This link displays that communities are built based on interests that are shared between users.
Reflection
This paper describes the concept of microblogging and answers the question of “Why do people use Twitter?” well. The details and description of blogging versus microblogging I found very compelling because I’ve used both tools before; in the past I had used blogging sites such as WordPress and Tumblr, but have grown to enjoy Twitter more due to the brevity of each post. I also found it intriguing how the conclusions of this paper (the three main intentions addressed above) can possibly be considered “obvious” to current users of Twitter in 2017 – we use Twitter to communicate with friends, to share information about our lives, to seek information in the world, etc. This is likely due to the increase in momentum of Twitter since the paper was written (i.e. Twitter has evolved and had an increase in its number of users since it has been available for 11 years as a microblog tool). Additionally, I think it would be interesting to perform another study on Twitter today to see if microblogging intentions are the same or different ten years later.
Questions
- Why is the user’s geographic location important? Is there a correlation between a user’s location and their intent to microblog?
- Do users of a certain geographic locations tweet more about specific topics than others? What topics and why?
- Why at the time was Twitter popular mainly popular in the U.S., Europe, and Asia? Also, why specifically New York, San Francisco, and Japan?
- Since this paper was written, have the main intentions of users changed?
