140Char

Last night I spent a fair bit of time chatting about Twitter with a friend in the publishing industry, as we talked about how useful we find it, and how it has replaced some of our usage of email and Facebook. We’re both around 30, and we’re both mixing professional and personal use to connect with work contacts and friends.

And yet, sat on the train home surrounded by 10+ teenagers chatting away, there was not a single Twitter mention – overhearing them without trying to eavesdrop, my ears naturally picked up the 5 or 6 mentions of Facebook.

Anecdotal experiences are always interesting, but I’ve also been following the spread of Twitter surveys like the Pear Analytics ‘pointless babble’ whitepaper. By categorising 2000 tweets in English and in the US and putting them into buckets for News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value, they concluded that Pointless Babble makes up 40.55% of tweets, followed by Conversational and only 3.6% are news.

Many places simply repeated the study, but two people I respect a lot have responded:

There’s a great post by Stephen Fry, pointing out that Twitter was never advertised as anything other than a means to connect to people.

‘The clue’s in the name of the service: Twitter. It’s not called Roar, Assert, Debate or Reason, it’s called Twitter. As in the chirruping of birds.’

And the always well-reasoned research mind of Danah Boyd looks at whether the fact that conversation, both online and offline, tends to be social, is actually a good thing, anyway – and our obsession with trying to claim some measure of perceived value

‘I vote that we stop dismissing Twitter just because the majority of people who are joining its ranks are there to be social. We like the fact that humans are social. It’s good for society.’

Well worth reading…

Yesterday, Chris Hambly of Social Media Mafia circulatd the link to an online research paper about Twitter. In brief, this research downloaded the last 3201 tweets of about 300K users.  Twitter keeps only our last 3201 tweets.

200K were effectively  non-users and the remainder provided a sample of network connections for an ‘average’ period of 7 months.

This article caught the imagination of the Twittersphere.  One research finding in particular caught people’s eye: that we don’t have conversations with everyone in our Twitter stream.

I would have thought that’s obvious myself.  I am also uneasy about the use of the expression ‘average’ without co-reporting the distribution of the data.

This is fun research though. The authors, Huberman, Romero and Wu (2009) make the point that Twitter offers a brilliant opportunty to uplift digitalised network data and learn something about social networks.

That’s my ambition.  I want to become a lot more fluent in social network theory.  I’ve sent up a wiki & forum, Netinkers, where like-minded people can congregate, initially to parse the Huberman article and then to add others and to suggest lines of research.  We may not have the time and resources to do the research ourselves, but students might.  They are always on the lookout for ‘doable’ projects.

See you over there when you feel in a scholarly mood. The password is ‘playful’.