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?
