Mor Naaman , Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai. “Is it really about me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams.” ACM Digital Library, ACM, http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.
Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities.” http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1718953. Accessed 30 Aug. 2017.
Summary
The paper “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” looks at the microblogging phenomenon. More specifically, it focuses on Twitter, one of many platforms containing microblogging content. Using Twitter’s API, the paper finds that Twitter is popular worldwide with most popularity in North America, and has interactions of users between different continents based on available user data. With some analysis, the paper categorizes main user intentions on Twitter as Daily Chatter, Conversations, Sharing information/URLs, and Reporting news. Similarly, the paper categorizes main users as Information Source, Friends, and Information Seeker. In addition, the paper states that a user may have many intentions and/or many roles in many communities. The paper indicates improvements and ideas for new features for user retention can be found through the knowledge of how and why users are using a platform.
The paper “Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams” also focuses on Twitter, an example of what the paper calls “social awareness streams.” Using data through Twitter’s API, the paper analyses the activity of users on Twitter to categorize Twitter messages by its content. The paper finds that a majority of users focuses on themselves, and the minority share information. Of the two, the users who share information are found to be more social.
Reflection
I do not use Twitter at all, but I can imagine how Twitter users can be categorized into the categories specified in the papers. I am more familiar with Snapchat, and I believe that it can be considered a microblogging platform. However, Snapchat is more focused on photos and videos with less text unlike Twitter. I can see Snapchat users and user intentions fitting into certain categories. For example, with the recent share URL feature on Snapchat it is more obvious some user intentions are to share information/urls.
The importance of understanding how and why users use a platform as discussed in the “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” paper can be seen in Snapchat. Many improvements and new features on Snapchat come from how users use Snapchat. For example, before, a snap could only contain one line of text, but users were able to get around it by pasting a text with multiple lines into the snap. Now, Snapchat allows snaps to have more than one line of text. Another example is how video snaps can only record for a certain amount of time. Often, users took multiple video snaps to capture a long moment. Now, Snapchat added a feature so that multiple video snaps can be recorded continuously.
Questions
- The “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” paper mentions continents interacting more with each other when the language is common, and the data supports that North America interacts less with others while others interact more with North America. Is this because English is learned in other continents, so other continents can interact with North America more easily?
- I understand why Snapchat is popular for updating daily activities since snaps disappear after 24 hours, but why do people use Twitter for daily activity updates?
