Why we twitter

Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities. An article authored by Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng. The abstract reads as follows:

"Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other."

Tim Finin of the Ebiquity Group blogged that PhD student Akshay Java collected Twitter data from March 2007 and wrote the paper analyzing the the Twitter data subset from April and May of this year. Tim Finin added that Akshay Java's "dataset included about 1350K posts from over 75K users. The paper covers a lot of the standard statistics you would expect — usage trends, basic network properties, top hubs and authorities, community structure, and geographic distribution. Akshay’s title pays homage to the early paper that asked why we blog, but the title also reflects the paper’s key contribution — an attempt to tease out the user’s intention in writing a tweet, i.e. to analyze why people are using Twitter." The article is available as a pdf via a link below the abstract.