Twitter I: Towards an Ambient,
Friend-Following Medium
In much Twitter research, the software’s origins as an urban, mobile lifestyle tool for friends were largely lost, in a sense, to the etymology of the service name, and the inconsequentiality more generally of tweets. Marketing firm Pear Analytic were among those to study the meaning of tweets, finding them of scant interest (Kelly, 2009). The focus turned to their banality. The BBC news headline about the study read: “Twitter tweets are 40% ‘babble’” (BBC News, 2009). The firm manually categorised some 2,000 tweets over a two-week period. As became the norm in Twitter research, they conceived of a series of tweet types, beginning with the senseless: Tweets that were ‘pointless babble’, that is, of the “I’m eating a sandwich” type. The other categories of tweets were ‘conversational’, of ‘pass-along value’, ‘self-promotional’, and ‘spam’, where those of pass-along value (and thus of particular informational interest) were estimated at under 9 per cent of the total. Indeed, characterising tweet types, determining how many of them are of value, and evaluating Twitter as more or less interesting content became the focus of the early studies. Java, Song, Finin, & Tseng (2007) characterised most tweets as “daily chatter”, and in a sense, also showed that the other types of tweets were not built into the design and relied on subsequent innovations. “Conversations” on Twitter were beginning to take place, owing to the use by early adopters of the @ symbol for replies to a particular user (Honeycutt & Herring, 2009). “Sharing information” concerned commenting on URLs, which required shortening. The fourth category, “reporting news”, also prompted user innovation; the # symbol caught on in Twitter when users reported about the San Diego fires in 2007, with #sandiegofire (Sutton et al., 2008).
Twitter II: Towards a News Medium for Event-Following
In November 2009, Twitter’s tagline changed. The question Twitter users were asked had been “What are you doing?” It became “What’s happening?” To David Crystal, the linguist and author of Txting: The gr8 db8, the change signified a move from an ego to a reporting machine (Tate, 2009). Twitter studies were still focussed on the ego machine. Indeed, it has been found that “80% of Twitter Users Are All About Me”, as the Mashable headline read just prior to the tagline change (Van Grove, 2009). In studying 350 users, Naaman et al. (2010) made more fine-grained the scholarly characterisations of tweets, and many of the nine types they derived concentrate on what one could call ‘me-tweets’. In their tweet type classification, note that the banal has been subdivided into many kinds, and that there is really only one tweet type—“information sharing”—that could be considered ‘news’. Twitter’s tagline change could be interpreted as an internal shift, as well as a nudge for both users and researchers to consider information sharing tweets. Another co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, discussed Twitter’s new purpose when the trending topics feature was introduced in April 2009. It is a state-ofaffairs machine, or “discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now” (Stone, 2009). Dorsey, whose vision for Twitter usage always appeared to be more in the area of ambient intimacy, did aver that the service did “well at: natural disasters, man-made disasters, events, conferences, presidential elections”, or what he calls “massively shared experiences” (Sarno, 2009b). For it to be a machine for media events (as massively shared experiences are sometimes called), and for it to take that role from television, an argument should be made about its significance in a specific event.
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