Social Networks for Short Attention Spans? - Reasons to Twitter
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The researchers discovered that users with similar intentions often connect with each other. That’s pretty normal for any social network. They also found that most of the posts on Twitter dealt with what users were currently doing – the daily, routine stuff. But about a fifth of users carried out some kind of conversation with the aid of the application, and these messages made up about an eighth of the tweets studied.
About 13 percent of tweets included URLs. Apparently Twitterers like to share cool sites and information that they find online. To make the most of the 140 character limit on tweets, most posters used TinyURL or some other URL shortening service. Continuing with the information sharing theme, some users like to Twitter about news, either reporting it or just commenting on it. There are even automated agents posting news items – weather reports and other information from RSS feeds.
Now that we have a better feeling for why people use Twitter, let’s take a quick look at the types of Twitter users. The paper broke them into three categories. The first is an information source. This kind of user has a large number of people who follow their posts. They may be frequent or infrequent posters; they may even be automated tools! But their posts are always valuable.
The second type of user is a friend. Friends may be of varying types of closeness, and there are many different sub-categories of friends, including family and co-workers. Finally, the third type of Twitter user is an information seeker. This is someone who posts only rarely, but follows a number of other users regularly.
The authors concluded that Twitter is somewhat useful the way it is now, but it could benefit from additional features. The ones they mentioned included the ability to categorize friends into groups and more features to allow greater sharing between users. It sounds like they would like to see Twitter turn into more of a social network – which brings us to Pownce.
Next: Pownce…and Pulse >>
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