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?
