What is Twitter?
According to Twitter’s homepage:
“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?“
Initially designed for use on personal computers, Twitter launched a mobile interface in 2007 that allows Tweets to be accessed on mobile devices. Messages can be sent and received via cellphone text messaging (SMS), the Twitter Web site or a third-party Twitter application. A MySpace account can also be updated. CEO Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone co-founded Twitter in 2006. Twitter operates a free digital service site that blends social networking with the ability to post short messages (or micro-blogs) limited to 140 characters or less, commonly known by users as “Tweets”.
Twitter was designed as a social network to keep friends and colleagues informed throughout the day. However, it became widely used for commercial and political purposes to keep customers, constituents and fans up-to-date as well as to solicit feedback. Nevertheless, Twitter messages (“tweets”) can be made public and sent to anyone requesting the feed, or they can be sent only to approved followers in order to preserve a little more privacy.
Initially a one-way broadcast from writer to follower, Twitter added a reply function that turned Twitter into a discussion group service. When someone replies to a Twitter posting, they use their Twitter account name preceded by an @ sign. Twitter became a viral conduit when users initiated “retweeting,” which forwards tweets they get to their followers. People retweet to pass on worthwhile information, and the ease of retweeting can quickly build large audiences.
A hashtag is a # prefix used to group tweets together. For example, our language resources’ group use #lr0910 in our posting about the subject, but we can use#ProfesorSangre to laugh at exams, or #uribarrifacts to comment the “gifts” of the expert on Eurovision.
Evan Williams, one of the creators of Twitter, states that Twitter is closer to an information network than to a social network:
“What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as it’s not a social network, but it’s an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world”.
Twitter emphasized their news and information network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question it asks users for status updates from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?”
However, San Antonio- based market research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a 2-week period in August 2009 from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and separated them into six categories:
Pointless babble: 41 %
Conversational: 38%
Pass-along value : 9%
Self-promotion : 6%
Spam: 4%
News: 4%
Social networking researcher Danah Boyd responded to the Pear Analytics survey by arguing that what the Pear researchers labelled “pointless babble” is better characterized as “peripheral awareness” ot “social grooming”.
During a February 2009 discussion on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, Daniel Schorr noted that Twitter accounts of events lacked rigorous fact-checking and other editorial improvements. In response, Andy Carvin gave Schorr two examples of breaking news (the attacks in Mumbai and the riots in Greece) stories that played out on Twitter and said users wanted first-hand accounts and sometimes debunked stories.
Appart from this, Twitter has been also used in legal proceedings, education (University of Vienna, Shangai Jiao Tong University, University of Texas at Dallas), emergencies (American Red Cross), protests and politics, business or in space missions.
sources:
Dejar un comentario
¡Sea el primero en comentar!
