To tweet, or not to tweet – that is the question for the tech-savvy wary of yet another social networking site. But after helping shine a light on political unrest in Iran last summer, the popular micro-blogging site seems to have a little more currency and staying power than most fly-by-night websites. Is Twitter the future of online communication or just another fad du jour?
Miles Efron, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, is an expert in information retrieval and text mining. He was interviewed by News Bureau news editor Phil Ciciora about Twitter’s rising popularity.
How do you explain Twitter’s popularity and addictiveness?
Twitter’s first virtue is its simplicity. It involves a low barrier to entry and little ongoing effort on the part of its users.
We might think of this in contrast to some earlier socially driven services – for instance, recommender systems such as those used by Amazon and Netflix. They require investing a significant amount of time rating items in order to train the software to recognize people with similar tastes.
By contrast, building a meaningful social network on Twitter is very easy. If you can find even one person you’d like to follow, it’s not much of a reach to look at their friends in order to find more people whose tweets you would like to read.
Likewise, the informal social norms on Twitter make it likely that if I follow you, you will in turn follow me.
So without investing much time or effort, it’s easy to build a network on Twitter where you’re likely to see tweets written by people who interest you and where you feel like people will read your own tweets. A lot of the appeal of Twitter comes from the sense it gives people that ‘I can say something that matters,’ where what it means for a statement to matter is highly personal and often very informal.
Related to this is something I’ve found in my own research. If you sample people’s accounts over time, the size of users’ social networks on Twitter is very stable.
That is, people tend to have about 100 friends and 100 followers. (Obviously, there are exceptions to this.) Those numbers don’t seem to move very much. Having followed them for about a year, I’ve seen no appreciable change in social network size in the Twitter population at large.
Why is that the case?
One answer is information overload. How many people can I follow before my incoming Twitter stream is unmanageable? I haven’t tested this hypothesis, but it suggests an opening both for researchers and businesses. I think there is room for real improvement in the tools that people use to manage their Twitter stream.
This brings up another factor in Twitter’s success: They have made it easy for third parties to develop systems that capitalize on and add value to people’s experience with the service. Dedicated Twitter clients such as TweetDeck offer features that help users make sense of the information directed at them. More experimental systems are making efforts to tame information overload.
Ultimately, will Twitter change how we communicate?
I think Twitter has a chance of making some real changes in how people interact with information. An example of how is in search. For years the dominant gateway to electronically available information has been search engines. Want to learn about something? Google it.
In my research, though, I’ve found that people are using Twitter to ask questions, and to get answers to those questions from their social network. Taking samples from Twitter, I’ve found that about 13 percent of tweets contain a question. A lot of these questions are rhetorical, but many aren’t: They involve people seeking facts, opinions and consensus. So-called social search service websites like vark.com already exist. But I think that Twitter supports an informal platform for social search that is really compelling.
Does this mean that search engines are dead? Absolutely not. If you want to find facts immediately, it’s hard to argue with the value of search engines. But if you want opinions from people you trust; if you want to find consensus, asking questions on Twitter makes sense. And of course, this shouldn’t be much of a surprise – one of the tried and true ways to find information has always been to ask someone. Twitter simply changes the way that this asking happens, which in turn changes (and will continue to change) what people ask and how people respond to questions.
