QotW7: Tweets, tweets, tweets - "What are you doing?"

Since of our first step into the world, community plays a significant part in our lives especially our development and maturation through exchanging our experiences with others in the community (Fernback & Thompson, 1995). It helps us not only define our individuality and identity in society but also form our own personal, cultural values and perceptions of things around us such as our family, our school, or our church. In fact, with development of the Internet today, online community has become an essential part of our lives besides our existing offline social networks as it expands our knowledge and perception of the world through our interaction with people from different parts of Earth. Concerning with Twitter, a current networking site developed by Obvious Corporation in San Francisco in March, 2006 inviting people to answer the question “What are you doing?”, in my opinion, Twitter, in fact, is a growing virtual community where members can freely exchange information on their daily activities with others from all over the world (Twitter, 2007).

Simply with just a free existing email account, anyone can register with a pseudonym in Twitter to invite friends to join or connect with existing members. Users send short messages to their friends about what they are doing or what they are thinking through the web, instant messaging (IM), or mobile phone (txt). Each message is limited only to 140 characters without limit on number of messages that user can send. In fact, these messages will be posted automatically in a chronological order in both users’ and their friends’ personal web pages. Besides, users can also specify whether they want to limit their networks of friends or expand those to the public and obtain updated messages from their friends through the web, mobile phone, or instant messaging.

Pic. 1. Updating from "mobile phone"

Pic. 2. Twitter's phone sheets

Pic. 3. Updating from "web"

Pic. 4. Updating from "Instant Messaging"

According to Fernback and Thompson (1995) “online community is a social relationship forged in cyberspace through repeated contact within a special boundary or place (a conference or a chatline) that is symbolically delineated by topic of interest”. Everyday, hundred of messages are posted on Twitter from users’ shared random moments in their lives, thoughts, to news events provided by BBC or Google Corporation. For instance, here is a sample log of particular posted message on Twitter.

Although these updated messages in Twitter may seem to be trivial post of “what we are doing”, they carry specific category such as status-related “eating some dark chocolate”, link sharing “Twitter on WSJ”, public responses “@joshrt”, and announcements “Vilsack dropped out…” (Rickrey, 2007). In addition, these messages also convey a great “sense of common interest” shared among members, forming friends, sharing links, and exchanging information not only on their daily activities but also on news events happening around them (Wellman & Gullia, 1996). In fact, two greatest motivations in the development of Twitter include its diversity in messages from the freedom of posts and utilities, the mash up of blogging, instant messaging, and mobile phone tools fostering a strong bond among users in Twitter as users can update and view posted messages easily wherever they are. However, there is a lack of management on Twitter leading to a great problem that current Twitter users are encountering, a flood of content on the site as users have focused more on the quantity rather than the quality of their messages. In spite of this efficiency, Twitter’s growth has continued significantly. Though people have said that Twitter is completely useless and they don’t want all this information. “We check in later, and they are complete addicts,” said Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s founder in Obvious Corporation on Wall Street Journal Online March 16, 2007.

Not only for users, Twitter is also online community among developers according Dorsey (2006) providing developers opportunities to be creative with the services and products built around Twitter through using “the combination of a real-time device-independent platform paired with an open API”. Moreover, to enhance users’ experience on the site, Twitter has also set up a Twitter Fan Wiki where both users and developers exchange ideas, opinions, and feature requests on Twitter to build up a better a community.

Despite the inefficiency in its overwhelming of information, Twitter has actually become a part of our daily routine providing us opportunities to keep in touch and more importantly, to share our moments, our ideas, and our opinions not only in our lives but also in society instantly with our friends and people from the other side of the world.

References

Codel, E. (2006, December 5). LunchMeet: Twitter is the obvious choice. Retrieved 10:00 March 16, 2007 from http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1607/lunchmeet-twitter-is-the-obvious-choice

Fernback, J. & Thompson, B. (1995, May). Virtual communities : abort, retry, failure? Retrieved 21:00 March 14, 2007 from http://www.rheingold.com/texts/techpolitix/VCcivil.html

Lavallee, A. (2007, March 16). Friends swap twitters, and frustration - New real-time messaging services overwhelm some users with mundane updates from friends. Retrieved 18:00 March 16, 2007 from http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117373145818634482-ZwdoPQ0PqPrcFMDHDZLz_P6osnI_20080315.html

Obvious. (2007). Twitter – About us. Retrieved 22:00 March 15, 2007 from http://twitter.com/help/aboutus

Rey, R. (2007, February 23). To twitter or not to twitter. Retrieved 22:00 March, 16, 2007 from http://www.rickrey.com/blog/2007/02/to-twitter-or-not-to-twitter/

Wellman, B. & Gulia, M. (1996, April). Net sufers don’t ride alone: virtual communities as communities. Retrieved 21:00 March 15, 2007 from http://www.acm.org/~ccp/references/wellman/wellman.html