Social Networks for Short Attention Spans?
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Twitter, Pownce, and several other companies stand out as riders of the latest web 2.0 trend: microblogging. When coupled with other features, microblogging connects users in more ways than regular blogging or even instant messaging. If this is the social network of the future, what does it mean for you and your business?
The epitome of the company that’s all about microblogging is Twitter. Launched in March 2006, Twitter has been described as part blog, part social networking site and part cell phone/IM tool. Users typically answer the question “What are you doing?” in posts that are limited to 140 characters. These “tweets” can either go out to everyone or be sent as private messages. When they go out to everyone, they appear on Twitter’s web site in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts first.
There are certain features that make Twitter more useful. You can make friends with users and follow their posts, rather like an RSS feed. You can send Twitter posts with your cell phone using its text messaging feature; you can also send them via instant message. And a convention has arisen of using the “at” sign and a user’s name to direct a comment to a particular person, to make conversations at least a little more possible.
Once you have at least one friend on Twitter, the home page for your own account shows not only your tweets, but also the tweets of your friends. You can still access the page that shows all tweets, of course, but the one that shows only your own friends is a little more personal; it’s more focused, and presumably easier to hold a conversation. There are tools for Twitter that let users add Twitter functionality to their desktops, add location information to tweets, and so on. More tools are probably in the works, since Twitter publishes its API.
Still, why would someone want to use an application that lets them announce to the world what they had for breakfast? Believe it or not, several researchers have already written a paper on the subject. “Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging” analyzed two months of Twitter data (1,348,543 posts from 76,177 unique users) ending May 30, 2007. The authors included researchers from the University of Maryland and NEC Laboratories America. While some of their discoveries were not surprising, others suggest interesting uses for the application.
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