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

The author of this article talks about the study they conducted on 350 Twitter users and categorized the users’ posts. This allowed them to monitor the actions and behaviors of the users as well as the differences. They call this a “social awareness stream” (SAS) where they monitor social activity and detect patterns in activities of users. SAS takes in three factors including the public nature of connection, the brevity and the connection space of the information. Using this they were able to discover three activities that were predominant of users including information seeking, sharing, and social activity. They explained what kind of information they took in from the users and how they used that data to analyze the activity of the users. They tried to answer three main questions of common messages, differences between users in messages and content. This analysis helped them determine what kind of activity the majority of users focus on.

Reflection

This article helps me think about a few things about using social awareness streams as a tool. It is a powerful tool to understand the public user. When I interned at a big data company, they focused on creating actionable consumer intelligence by having select number of users monitored. This gave the company so much information from demographics to little actions the user would make. I believe with this data the developer/seller can know what his target audience is prioritizing. This article pointed out that from their analysis that the user focus was on their “self” more than “sharing”. This means twitter is an outlet for users to gain information for themselves. It is also used to hold onto relationships between users and create connections. This is important information that Twitter can use to implement new ideas and make their platform more user friendly.

Questions

What other areas did users focus on?

What other factors may be taken into consideration in SAS?

What other activities did users commit besides the major three?

Questions I can ask for my project

What is the focus of your users?

What questions do you need to ask to analyze your data?

What can you do with the information you gather?

What can you change to benefit the user using the platform?

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Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, Belle Tseng. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf.

Summary

The authors of “Why we Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities” seek to explore a more in depth analysis of the way microblogging users interact with one another across the world, as well as the reasons for which they interact. Microblogging is a relatively new form of communication, where ideas are shared much more succinctly than traditional blogging or news printing. This form of online expression is a rapidly growing phenomenon and has tons of information just waiting to be analyzed. The first major topic covered in the article was an effort to find the correlation between users on the site that were acquaintances with one another, and those who were not. Using a node based algorithm, it was then determined that there was a high degree correlation and reciprocity, meaning that the number of users that have previously known one another was relatively high. One other discovery from this information was that new users who joined twitter were very likely to have been referred to by a friend of theirs, rather than discovering the site on their own. The next topic of discussion was how geography affected microblogging users globally. Despite only roughly half of the users in their data disclosing their actual location, it was found that Twitter was most popular in the United States, as well as Europe, with Asia as a close third. What this data was able to show was the relationship of friendships between two Twitter users, and their geographical location. In other words, the closer you were to one another, the more likely it is that you will be friends or follow that user. Similarly, those users who speak the same language are more likely to follow one another than those who do not. This stems off the same idea of the importance of geographical location.

Reflection

This paper was interesting because I have been a microblogging user for quite some time, however I never realized how much data there truly was to analyze. I think the authors compiled a well written article, and their points of focus were valid and showed true insight into how and why users interact with one another the way they do. That being said, I wish the article had gone more into depth about how geographical locations can affect the type of content being produced from the users in that area. More specifically, does geographical location have any relation to the ideas or messages that Twitter users are tweeting? Furthermore, the same analysis could be done for the language of the user.

Questions

Can we find a relationship between the topics of tweets based on geographical location?

Do major geographical locations across the globe discuss similar topics? I.E. are other countries discussing things that go on in the United States? Or do their intentions lie solely within their own country.

Are microblogging sites only popular and appealing to the younger generation, or is the age distribution of users even?

Can a user’s twitter data be used to determine their socioeconomic status?

Can a user’s twitter data be used to determine their personal interests, perhaps for companies to use in order to tailor advertisements in a region.

 

Read More

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.

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 “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”, the authors observe the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter to analyze the user intentions at a community level and show how relationships are formed over similar intentions. From their analysis, the authors found that there were 4 main types of user intentions; daily chatter, conversations, sharing information, and reporting news. Daily chatter was the most common type of user intention. Furthermore, they found that users play different roles in different communities. Additionally, 3 main categories of users were found: Information Source, Friends, and Information Seeker. Friends was the largest category. The paper concludes that a single user could have various roles depending on the community he or she is in; with most users using Twitter to discuss about their daily lives with others they have a relationship with.

In the paper “Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social Awareness Streams”, the authors wanted to see what could be learned about user behavior on Twitter based off analysis of message content from Twitter users. To accomplish this, the authors gathered Twitter messages posted by a random sample of Twitter users and categorized the messages based off message content. There were 9 categories for the messages to fall under. Due to the short format and lack of context, messages were often assigned to more than just 1 category. The messages were also categorized based of the gender of the user and the type of application used to post the messages. From their coding, the authors split the studied users into two groups; “Informers” and “Meformers”. Informers are users, who post mainly information sharing based content, while Meformers are users, who post mainly about their current emotional state and recent activities. The authors suggest that Informers are more conversational than Meformers due to Informers posting more mentions and replies to other users as well as having more social contacts and social interaction.

Reflection

I do not have a Twitter account; however, I have been on the site before and am aware of the popularity of the site and the type of environment that is prevalent there. Both articles analyzed Twitter, although from different perspectives, they both found that most of users used Twitter to gain information, share information, or talk about themselves. Unsurprisingly, the largest category was users talking about themselves, whether it was about their day or how they are currently feeling. It was interesting how the second article, “Is it Really About Me?”, states that despite most users being Meformers, the Informers were more conversational. Usually, people post about themselves to get feedback or even validation from others, especially from people they would have relations with. However, it is possible that since Meformers are sharing personal information, they may be pickier about who can view this information while Informers are sharing more impersonal information and thus, may not care who views it as long as it’s being viewed. This also ties in with the results found in the first article, “Why We Twitter”, about how a single user may have multiple intentions or different roles in different communities.

Questions

• What aspects of Twitter makes it such a popular choice in comparison to other microblogging platforms?
• With the rise of digital journalism, would these information sharing Twitter accounts be considered reputable and would that be why information sharing and seeking are main user intentions?
• If users serve different roles depending on the community they are in, isn’t it possible that users would create multiple accounts for the various roles? If so, are those accounts seen as the same user or is each account is its own unique entity?
• Where public figures included in these experiments? Would they be considered as Informers or Meformers?
• What aspects does an Informer need to gain followers? Does frequency of posts and how active the account is affect the number of followers?

 

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Works Cited

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

I analyzed the article “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities”. The purpose of the article was to first understand the purpose of microblogging, and how it differs from other forms of communication. Microblogging is defined as a form of blogging that lets you send updates to the public and friends about your life via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. This is different than blogging, because it provides a much faster and updated form of communication. The author describes the growth of Twitter, which initially expanded to 94,000 users just eight months after the launch. There are people from across the globe that use the microblogging site, but it is most popular in populated cities such as Tokyo, New York and San Francisco. The author notes that the number of new users has slowed down, while the number of daily posts has been consistent throughout the years. In order to resolve this, the author analyzes the user intentions of Twitter users. These include daily chatter, conversations, sharing information and reporting news. There are also many user roles, which include information source, friends and information seeker. Most people that use the microblogging site fall under many of these categories. While using the overall user intentions, we can infer the community intention. This is used to improve the microblogging site to gain more users.

Reflection

I found this article to be very interesting. As a frequent Twitter user, I had never heard of the others services Jaki and Pownce. It would be interesting to look into the correlation of the other services’ frequent user locations, and the differences between those services and Twitter. If those services have different features that make them popular in certain locations, somehow incorporating them into Twitter could make the platform much more successful. I think the idea of microblogging is fascinating; people can instantly update millions of followers with news, important information, what they’re doing with their life, and more. I believe this concept is just taking off. Years ago, we thought blogging and emailing was a fast way of communicating with people. With the way technology is changing, people will find new innovative ways to take microblogging to the next level, and to deliver information faster than ever before. When I use Twitter, I think I would fall into the category of “information seeker” and “friend”. I follow news sites, celebrities, friends, and informative sites to learn information about friends and what’s going on in the world. It’s very easy to find tweets about information you’re looking for. Twitter has a feature called “hashtag”, which produces a list of tweets that include the hashtag. It’s curious to see the what’s trending on the site, meaning that a majority of users are interested it. This information could be used to change the way Twitter presents its information. Twitter has a much larger pool of information than normal websites, because millions of people are contributing to it. It would be interesting to look into why people use microblogging so much frequently than other forms of communication. People can easily find information on news sites and text message to communicate with their friends. Why feel the need to share so much information in a short amount of time? The psychological reasons for it would be thought-provoking to research.

Questions

Why haven’t other microblogging sites been as successful as Twitter; what makes Twitter different?

Due to other countries’ cultures being diverse, do all countries have the same user roles and user intentions?

Are there other microblogging sites that are more popular in other countries? If so, how do they compare to Twitter?

Read More

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?

Read More

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?

 

Read More

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?

Read More

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?

Read More

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?

Read More

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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