Report for Graded Assignment 2 (Part 1)

Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter

1) Purposes of the study

This study analyzes a corpus of public twitter messages (tweets), focusing on the functions and uses of the @ sign and the coherence of exchanges.

2) Introduction

Twitter was launched in October 1996 by the name of Obvious. Twitter was created mainly to answer   question such as “what are you doing”. However, based on a study, most of the twitter messages did not actually answer this question.  Later on, the users used twitter  as a means of interaction. The @ sign is used as a maker of addressity in order to direct specific messages to specific ID users. One important  role for one-to- one interaction via twitter is collaboration. Twitter is highly potential to be  used as a medium to share ideas and coordinating activities just like the instant messaging. Based on the study, there were several important questions highlighted. Firstly, how well does twitter support user-to-user exchanges. Secondly, what are people using twitter for. Lastly, what usage or design modifications would be required to make it (more) usable as a tool for collaboration?

3) Research Questions:
a. What is the breakdown of the language of the tweets across time periods and to what extend is the sign @ used in tweets in different languages?

b.  How do instances of the sign @ function in English tweets?
c.  What do people tweet about and does it vary for tweets with and  without @ signs?
d. To what extent do English @ messsages that are directed to others receives responses, either with or without @ signs?
 e.  How long and how coherent are interactive exchanges, and to what extent do they make use of the @ sign?

4) Methodology

a. This research is done by analyzing conversations on the Twitter’s public timeline and focuses on the functions and uses of the @ sign.
b. Tweets were mostly collected from Twitter.com public timeline  in four one-hour samples gathered at four-hour intervals, starting at 6 a.m. and ending at 6 p.m on January 11, 2008

c. A total of 200 English tweets were collected (about 50 tweets per hour) based on public timeline

d. A program called “Twitter Scraper” was developed in order to capture tweets in three-second intervals and saves them in a database.

5) Findings
Findings were divided into 5 parts based on the five research questions stated above. These are some of the findings

a.    Language of tweets

Twitter became a global trend nowadays because of the instant increase of its users around the world. Twitter  is used by  people from different linguistic background. Based on this study, most tweets are written in English therefore, English is the common language of communication  in twitter.

b.  Functions of @ sign

From the research, at 6 p.m, 1472 tweets that employed the use of @ sign were collected. Based

on this extensive tweets, the common use of the @ sign is to address a specific tweet to a specific addressee. Besides, it is also used to refer to one’s current location.

c.  Content of tweets with and without @ sign

The content of tweets differ with and without the use of @ sign. The usage of @ sign marks that the tweet is more focused on a specific addressee and it is not for general twitter readership. Besides, it creates the interactive environment by exchanging tweets to one another. Meanwhile, tweets that are without the @ sign indicates that it is somehow more of self- focused and most of the time used in order  to make general announcements.

d.  Coherence of twitter conversations

The conversations occur in twitter are coherence because there will be one initiation and another one to response,  involving at least 2 people with or without the @ sign.

6) Discussion
The study investigated on the conversationality of twitter, with special attention on the role of @ sign.

Research questions:

a. Breakdowns on language of tweets and frequency on the use of @ sign across languages.

English speakers were the most dominant language group, followed by Japanese and Spanish speakers. The @ sign were at the same rate (around 30%) in all languages. This proves that twitter is used as a tool for interpersonal interaction is spreading globally.

b. How do instances of the @ sign function in English tweets?

The @ sign signifies that the tweet is part of a conversation. 

c. Content of tweets with and without @ sign.

Content of tweets with @ sign: indirectly contributing to expanding the types of content expressed in tweets.  

Content of tweets without @ sign: just answers the Twitter site's question "What are you doing?"

d. To what extent do English @ messages that are directed to others receive response? 

31% of tweets with @ received a response. It suggests that initiations usually require a response. It also indicates that even in a noisy Twitter environment, successful exchanges can and do take place.

7) Conclusion

Some users use Twitter for informal collaborative purpose and soon will be used for formal context as well. Twitter present challenges that users must overcome like the limited number of tweet per refresh that causes responses to be missed, limited history of tweets for followers, lack of interface view that displays tweets from users, and absence of search function. Design modification could make Twitter more suitable for collaboration. The problem of sheer size of Twitter and difficulty of tracking tweets from someone one may not be "following". 

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