Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities

The study I read about understanding why people use microblogging, is peculiarly interesting, because Twitter and it's phenomenon is not a very old thing on the web, and the fact, that some researchers have already attended to the subject, is rewarding.

I myself have used Twitter for couple of months now and I must say that the results from this study greatly coincide with my intentions (using Twitter).

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Researchers found out, that that people use microblogging firstly to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Compared to regular blogging, microblogging fulfills according to the research a need for an even faster mode of communication.

The second important difference between the two ways of personal-publishing is the frequency of update. "On average, a prolific blogger may update her blog once every few days; on the other hand a microblogger may post several updates in a single day." In a survey of bloggers, Nardi et al. [26] described different motivations for “why we blog”. Their findings indicated that blogs are used as a tool to share daily experiences, opinions and commentary.

"From our analysis, we find that the main types of user intentions are: daily chatter, conversations, sharing information and reporting news."

Another interesting variable the researchers focused on, was the relationship between having a lot of friends in the system (Twitter) and having a lot of followers (people, who read one's posts regularly). "A high degree correlation signifies that users who are followed by many people also have large number of friends."

Researchers outlined that user intention in Twitter can be roughly
categorized into 3 types: information sharing, information seeking, and friendship-wise relationships.

The authors of the study also offered a couple of interesting overviews of the subjects what certain Twitter-users focused on: "Figure 8 illustrates a representative community with 58 users closely communicating with each other through Twitter service. The key terms they talk about include work, Xbox, game, and play. It looks like some users with gaming interests getting together to discuss the information about certain new products on
this topic or sharing gaming experience."

The study also revealed (based on the communities in Twitter dataset), that "people in one community have certain common interests and they also share with each other about their personal feeling and daily experience".

There also appeared to be regularities of the subjects which users talked on. For example "Figure 11 shows the trends for the terms “friends” and “school” in the entire corpus. While school is of interest during weekdays, friends take over on the weekends."

In conclusion, it can be stated (based on this analysis), that the researchers found following main user intentions on Twitter:
-Daily Chatter
-Conversations
-Sharing information/URLs
-Reporting news

Main categories of users on Twitter:
-Information Source
-Friends
-Information Seeker

Researchers also concluded that this study revealed different motivations and utilities of microblogging platforms. "A single user may have multiple intentions or may even serve different roles in different communities."

Researchers also suggester, that Twitter should offer the ability to categorize friends into groups (e.g. family, co-workers). This would greatly benefit the adoption of microblogging platforms, based on the studies analysis of user intentions.

"Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities" by Akshay Java et al (2008)