Academia Weighs in on Twitter
So I’ve been thinking, what’s the protocol for trying to build up my bloggery? Clearly I need to start making posts, but should I pretend that I actually have an audience? Am I writing to my future readers who will hypothetically probably not read my old posts? Is this a taboo subject? Does it matter?
In any case, I just came across the first academic paper (to my knowledge) to present some formal analysis of Twitter. Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities comes to us from the CS Dept at the University of Maryland.
In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.
Kudos to the authors for looking into a major new internet phenomenon and providing us with some hard stats (hooray for low-hanging fruit.) However, I feel that this analysis misses the point in the way that almost every paper in this genre to come out of a CS department misses the point. The authors drill down fairly deeply into certain kinds of behaviours, such as information-sharing and information-seeking. However, by their own admission, these activities make up the minority of Twitter usage. The real meat is in the casual “what are you doing”-type messages, which are glibly described as “daily chatter.” What’s actually going on in this traffic — why do users generate it? What purpose does it serve? Do people actually pay attention to it? Of course, answering these questions will require somewhat more than a statistical analysis of network topography. But until someone does so, we’re not going to know what’s really happening on Twitter.
(Of course I would be remiss not to plug Kate, who is writing her dissertation on these very topics.)
[via Smart Mobs]
