Twitter+Research

[|"Twouble with Tweeting" YouTube video] Kara Hasaka In this YouTube video, the creators take a humorous and, at times, truthful outlook on the world of Twitter. The creators claim that people who use Twitter must not have any friends. They claim that if your followers were really your friends, they would call you to see how you were doing, instead of you just shouting out what you are doing in all hours of the day. However, from my viewpoint, not everyone has time to set aside half an hour a week for each close friend we want to keep in touch with. Instead, it is much easier to take a few seconds throughout the day to let everyone know what you are up o and what exciting is going on in your life. I do agree with the creators of the video that some people abuse and overuse Twitter to comment on their life. These people are attempting to make their lives sound exciting, when sometimes it can backfire on them. Some people make their lives seem mundane depending how often/ what they tweet throughout the day. Twitter can be a greatly effective way to observe and stay involved in friends lives’. This video definitely provoked my thoughts about Twitter and how outsiders perceive it. The creators claim that they “don’t care what you are doing” which I find interesting because, for the most part, people posting to Twitter DO care what others are doing, that’s why they follow certain people on Twitter. I pretty much came to the conclusion that Twitter is one of those love-it or hate-it phenomena Marcus Mancuso The article discusses statistics exploring the percentages of who follows who on twitter, based on gender. The statistics show that women hold 55% of twitter accounts, while men hold 45% of accounts. Although there are more women on twitter, men have about 15% more followers than women. Women usually follow men. On average women follow 44% women and 56% men. This shows that women using Twitter to find people are generally looking for men. However, we can’t make the assumption that this is simply a heterosexual trend because men mostly follow men too. Men, on average, follow 35% women and 65% men. Men on the internet, it seems, are interested in what other men are doing. I think that this has to do with male camaraderie being lost in this modern hectic world. The internet has become a new domain for brotherhood. Another thing I found interesting was the statistics involving Twitter accounts actually being used for Tweeting. The median number of tweets posted by all Twitter accounts is one tweet. 25% of Twitter users never tweet once. In fact, 90% of all activity on Twitter comes from the select group of the 10% most active Tweeters. Based on that information, I think that most of the people on Twitter are looking at other people, rather than Tweeting about their own lives. I think that people like to watch other people on the internet because it is safe. The internet allows a person to look into the Twitter life of another person without the Tweeter knowing their true identity.

Gabriela Bueno The article I found was about twitter Pear Analytics performed a study about twitter and its users. The study shows that more than 40% of twitter is pointless babble. The study was performed during a two week period in August 2009. The studies were done from 11 am to 5pm and they captured the tweets in half an hour increments said by Pear Analytics. The base of their study was how people were using twitter. They took 2000 people to perform the study and they categorized them into six categories. News, spam, self promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass along value. There results were “ Pointless Babble won with 40.55% of the total tweets captured” the second highest was conversational at 37.55% then followed pass along value at 8.7%. They also made other unusual finding like 1130 am and Mondays have the most tweets that pass along information. Spammers and news were heavier from 2pm to 4pm and heaviest on Tuesday. They will be performing a study quarterly to see if twitter will evolve from being posts of current activities to or be another news form site. I found this article interesting because sometimes I don find the point to twitter. What is the point of saying what you do every minute of the day? It may be because I don’t really go online too often or know many people that tweet each other. The article seemed interesting because it showed ideas of how I felt towards twittering. It was difficult to understand how they categorized people in the six groups they had. what I thought was kind of odd was that the study was done during a certain time frame and only for two weeks and they were able to categorize people and come up with results that fast. I found interesting how they said that at 1130 AM and Mondays have the most tweets that pass along information. How did they do that? And what do they consider passing along information. Overall I think this article was interesting but not something I would research since the information was not very extensive and detailed like I would like it to be. I would recommend this article to students who are interested in researching twitter and how you would be categorized when you do. I think it was an interesting study because of the results. Reading it will let you know the best time to log in and communicate with others, pass information or just blab about your day.  heres the link.[|twitter research] 

Ashleigh Cervantes In this article, it talks about how social networks connect to the media. Social networks such as twitter are becoming more and more popular. Within the article, you can see by the statistics that Twitter is growing by the minute, creating a new community. The increasing numbers give us high hopes for future media ways. The social networks are luring us away from our primary source of news that researchers even found that Twitter users are more likely to look up top online news more than the average person. Twitter has become another way for people to become engaged and informed in their communities. These social networks allow us to make friends, publish information, and discover. I think that some of these social networks can actually be good for us. It can get us more involved and at times, news can catch many people’s eyes. All of the information is transforming the way people are being informed and it’s constantly evolving our media.

Stephanie Burke: Article: “New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets” Authors: Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski Link: [] Statistics You Wouldn’t Expect: Twitter This article is based on research that was conducted in order to find out how people were using Twitter. The study was done with a random sampling of 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009. The findings were then compared to other social network sites. The researchers were shocked when the statistics were revealed. Out of the sample, 80% of users are followed by at least one user. By comparison only about 60-65% of other social media sites had at least one friend(when these networks were at similar levels of development). This shows us that people actually understand how to use Twitter; compared to more confusing sites such as Myspace or Facebook. Women make up 55% of Twitter users while men make up the other 45%. And men are more likely to have reciprocating relationships, in which two users follow each other, than woman are. Another shocking statistic is that the average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. This is shocking because generally women are the focus of most activity on social media sites; men follow content produced by women they do and do not know and women follow content of women they know. It is believed that this is due to the limited information shared on Twitter such as lack of photo sharing, biographies, e.t.c. Research also showed that the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. Which translates to over half of twitter users tweeting less then once every 74 days. The top 10% of users account for almost 90% of tweets. This shows that the majority of Twitter users are simply followers. You can use the information I have provided when studying which gender uses social media sites more or when studying the development of social media sites.

[|Who's Driving Twitter's Popularity?] Mary Hansen This article is about how Twitter gained popularity through adults. Unlike other social networks, like MySpace and Facebook, that became popular mainly through teenagers. Claire Cain Miller, the author of this article, explains how the younger generation sees Twitter in a more negative way and is not very comfortable with the concept of Twitter. Adults use Twitter not only to stay in touch and see what their friends are up to, but also to broadcast their ideas or ask questions to the outside world. They also use it for marketing a product or marketing the person who is tweeting. Teenagers do not have much need for that so they prefer more personal social networks like Facebook. Although Miller explains how Facebook is also used primarily by adults now as well. While Facebook started out mainly being used by the younger generation, adults have began taking it over. Teenagers prefer Facebook to Twitter, Miller Explains, because you personally get to choose who sees your updates. Plus, Twitter is an easy way to keep up with news or for businesses to keep up with contacts. This makes it hard for the network to be a social place for friends. As I was reading this article I wasn’t surprised that adults use Twitter more. I had sort of figured that was the case. What did interest me was the reasons adults use it more. I had always just figured that adults simply enjoyed saying what they were up to and finding out what others were up to. That is only a small part of Twitter though. People use it to help their businesses and market themselves and find out news. This helps to explain why the younger generation is not so interested in Twitter. This text can help us in our research because it talks about social networks, mainly Twitter, and explains what helps to make these websites popular. It is a credible article, from the New York Times and is pretty recent so it could be a help if you were researching Twitter.

__**Different Generations**__ Jacob Coday John Rogers talks about how different generations seem to like certain social networking sites. He mentions that the younger generation seems to like Twitter more than Facebook. It seems that since we, the younger generation, grew up in the era of texting short responses, we are comfortable with the short text format of Twitter. The younger generation also feels the obligation to tell each other exactly what they are doing at every moment in their lives. On the other hand, it seems that Facebook has been adopted by more of the older generation. They are not as interested in the moment to moment and more interested in the whole day. The author got a quote from Jeffery Cole “’One thing we have seen for a while is that for teenagers, social networking sites are like nightclubs, When a nightclub becomes too popular, or the uncool kids start showing up, the cool kids are out of there.’” The author is implying that the younger generation is always for the latest in new technology, while the older generation is happy to stick with what they know. After reading this article there are a lot of interesting thoughts that pop into my head. One question that runs through my mind is, when the inventors of these social networking sites start the site, what age generation are they trying to reach and was that generation the one that started using it? Are they still are using that site? Another question I have is does the social networking site affect the economy; does it take away from coffee shop or other gathering places? I find it very interesting how quickly new social networking sites start, spread, and then are put to the side for another networking site. While reading this article I was a little confused on what generation enjoyed which site and why. At first it was confusing but then after reading it I started to realize why they were using it and it made sense. I’m interested in trying to find who started this networking site and what the new sites out there are.

http://www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_12413567

[] (Jenna Silverman) 1) This article was about how more men follow men then women following a man. Even though there are more women then men that have Twitter accounts, men have more male followers. Of all the Twitter users, women hold 55%, while men hold 45%. Both men and women have a similar number of people who they follow, men tend to have 15% more followers. Women tend to follow more people then they have followers. Males are twice as likely to follow another man then to follow a female. A female is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Both males and females “tweet” on average the same amount. Some men follow the updates about women they both know and don’t know. Women on the other hand, follow women they do know. 2) While reading this article about the difference of men and woman on Twitter made me think about why men follow men more on average then they follow women. I find this interesting because it’s something I would never think of. I would think that people would follow the same amount of people from both sexes, not the same sex. I would like to know more about why men follow more men, and why women follow more people then they have followers.

__Twitter Not So Popular with the Young People__ Allison Laviolette This article written by Jacqui Cheng, was informing readers the popularity among age groups who use Twitter. People ages 25 and younger, make up a quarter of internet users but, of these people, only 16 percent are involved with Twitter. It was stated that 64 percent of users were between the ages of 25 to 54, and 20 percent were 55 or older.This obviously shows that the micro-blogging website attracts people of the older generation. Adults like the fact that Twitter brings in world wide news as well as marketers and journalists who use this website to build connections. I think this article was interesting because I was able to find out the statistics of the internet users under certain age groups. One other thing I found interesting was the actual fact that Twitter is used by our parents and their friends, or people they are associated with. It is weird to think about because I feel like our generation has become the technology freaks, not theirs. I'm still unclear to the fact as why Twitter has helped the older generation connect in a deeper way, or why they seem to like it so much. This is a good source for someone who is interested in researching Twitter and the popularity of its users. http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/the-tech-observer/2009/08/07/twitter-not-so-popular-with-the-young-people/

[|Do We Really Need Twitter or Not?] Wanchai Xiong Michael Saguri's article "Do We Really Need Twitter or Not" talks about how businesses can use Twitter to search around the world to see if their products can be sold in that particular location. Twitter also allows them to search for specific date and time to see if there are converstions going on about their products. Michael Saguri argues whether the decision to use Twitter makes that person a spammer. Even though it's a yes and no, why wouldn't a business person take full advantage of the resources he/she has that can triple their sales in one day. What I find interesting is that Twitter is going against its own rules and regulations by asking its users to gain as much followers as one can. Therefore, if Twitter is going against its own rules, then we wouldn't be afraid to do so also. I'm curious to know how businesses can advertise their products with 140 characters.

Interesting article on Twitter and market research: [|Is Twitter an Effective Marketing Tool?] (Kara Hasaka) In this article, the author, Tom Davenport, makes a point to indicate the uselessness of Twitter in his own mind and how it is a “fad” and begs the questions: “Twitter and other social media may be fun, but are they really serious marketing tools?” Davenport first observed this when a few of his students thought maybe Welch’s grape juice company could start using Twitter to advertise and connect with customers. Davenport found this absolutely absurd because, in his opinion, “busy moms” make up Welch’s core customers, who, for the most part, do not use Twitter. I believe that he is being close-minded about Twitter and its effectiveness in the media. He is forgetting about all the college students and teenagers who also drink the juice and use other Welch’s products who could be easily accessed by Twitter. Also, he does mention the “low-risk” factor of using a Twitter in marketing, but also choosing to comment on the “low-return” aspect of it as well. Davenport then goes on to rant out the characteristics of Twitter and how it is a “fad” and as “this year’s Second Life” and how no one ever mentions Second Life anymore. However, although it may not be as popular as it used to be, Second Life has many devoted users who enjoy it and use it every day, only because it is not talked about as much, he thinks Second Life has faded. He concludes the article calling Twitter “in the long run, not worth a tweet.” In this article, I found that Davenport is too harsh on Twitter. He seems to see it as a burden to him and it is completely ruining our social system and how its use. He also admits to not seeing the use of it, which is why he could be so anti-Twitter. I can assume from the article that he has never used Twitter, because he never mentions it, which could be yet another reason for his misunderstanding of it. As I mentioned before, Davenport sees Twitter as a “low-risk, low-return” type of marketing. However, because it is low risk, it is a win-win situation for companies who choose to use Twitter as a marketing tool. It is simple to create and maintain a Twitter account, so they could easily reach current and potential customers via Twitter. Also, if it doesn’t work out quite right, the company has no need to worry because it can cost little to no money to maintain their Twitter account. In large, Davenport is very anti-Twitter and it seems silly for him to be so adamant on Twitter as a useless trend, because it is harmless fun and it helps communities stay in touch. Overall, I think this article could be useful in research because it gives one the chance to get inside the head of a more reluctant tweeter and gain their mindset for those of us who think Twitter could be used as a great marketing tool.

From Kim Jaxon: Here's a link to a short, interesting lecture on Twitter:[|TED speeches Twitter]

From Kim Jaxon: Interesting blog/article about the growth of Twitter and its future: [|Twitter is to X]

From Kim Jaxon: Website with articles related to social media sites: [|Mashable]

From Kim Jaxon: Wired article about Twitter and creativity: [|Scott Brown on Twitter-Testing New Material]

From Kim Jaxon: Here's a link to a Common Craft video about Twitter: [|What is Twitter?]

Twitterphiles,Please help Beth Cylke This article was basically asking why do people use it and that it is just so dang confusing. Why would she post things to people she doesnt know about her most ridiculous moments. Who knows how true peoples post are, for example, "**//@Lunch: With Brangelina—they are drunk".//** Why would i want thousands of people to know what im going to do or what time im going to lunch with my friend. If she wants to know what time were meeting and where ill text her or call her. She also expresses that she feels twitter is just another thing to do that wastes time when she has bigger and better things to do. If shes friends with a celebrity or the president why would she want them to know what shes doing, it might be kind of embarassing telling everyone shes standing in the rain with her subway sandwich waiting to go home. Overall She complains that everything in twitter is bascially pointless, like what some celebrity had to drink five minutes ago or somebody decided to take their dog for a walk, why would she care. Summing it up, she says she Tweets everyday to her friends, family, and co-workers but they actually listen to me and not just read it. i agree with this article 100%. i feel that twitter is pretty confusing and why do i want people i don't even know follow me and know what im doing. Twitter is almost a creepier facebook because you can know what people are doing basically 24/7. what i would like to find out more about twitter is what is the majority age group of twitter and why is it such an attraction to people? http://www.newsweek.com/id/189657

__Is Twitter here to stay?__

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/18494/page2
Tiffany Richter In this article, the author, Wade Roush makes a point that; it’s Twitter who is “essentially turning the one-to-one channels of instant messaging and phone-based SMS text messaging into broadcast media.” People of Twitter use the website or their own means of communication to compose short messages to the viewers to reflect on their personal lives. Once a member submits this message, if it’s not private or posted onto the public timeline, anyone can read this message on the web. According to Twitter engineer Biz Stone, “Twitter had about 100,000 members as of late March, and membership has been doubling every three weeks.” Twitter is a growing web community and the members of this web-based community are getting to know more and more about the other members. These members share a range of information with each other, varying from names and birthdays, to “what’s your favorite food.” Twitter is a place where you can communicate with others around the world to share your instantaneous thoughts and actions, or whatever you wish. “In this respect, Twitterers resemble bloggers, except that most updates have a rawer, more dashed-off flavor--which is to be expected, since they're also far shorter and more ephemeral than blog posts.” In this sentence Roush is trying to show how tweeting resembles other forms of communication on the web, however, tweeting is much more simple and more “in-depth.” In Stone’s review, he thinks that members like the services that Twitter offers because it lets them stay connected with friends and family without technical complications. Stone states, “Twitter is a sophisticated, device-agnostic, social message routing system that nobody realizes they need until they try it," Stone says. "We've lowered the barrier to keeping in touch such that the only thing that matters is what you and your friends are doing." Although there is an abundance of people that enjoy Twitter, some people say that it is a complete waste of time and that it should be removed form the web. The company is experiencing some issues with its own sudden growth. The unanticipated storm of Twitters has resulted in occasional slowdowns and downtime. There is some skepticism on whether or not Twitter is a company that is here to stay. This article poses many questions to me, like “How will the engineers of Twitter be able to save their company is the community population starts to diminish?” “How will the people of the community respond to their network coming to and end?” I’m not sure if these questions are ones that can be answered or not. I found this entire article to be interesting, and was able to learn about other perspectives on this community. I think that we can use this research in taking a deeper look into the connections of Twitter and how this “broadcast media” is developing or not.

Kinsey Avery [] “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live” This article talks about how twitter was founded and how many were skeptical at first. People didn’t think reading about the person’s choice of cereal was very interesting. Steve Johnson then states //Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds.// Earlier this year in the Hacking Education conference, many people were twittering, by the end of the conference there was a summary of what was happening, people’s opinions on it, and comments about the conference. Twitter had made a much larger audience to what was suppose to be a somewhat private affair. This website made it possible to have genuine conversations with people in different states, people we have never met, and our next-door neighbor. Johnson stated //If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.// Which is true. People are interested in other people opinions and like to voice theirs. Twitter is now a conversational medium. We live in a crazy world of drugs, rape, starvation, debt, nature disasters, but here we are looking for new, fun, interesting ways to talk to each other. This article was interesting to me because I did not want to get twitter and I did not support it. After reading it I found it interesting that that many people are using twitter not just to tweet about what they had for breakfast but to talk about world policies and important things. I like that people are becoming closer and speaking to each other more often, but I don’t like that we are constantly on our phones or computers and not enjoying the simple things in life. I chose this article because we had to get a titter for class and I want to research it. By doing this it has made me more open to using twitter, I now see a purpose. My only question is are we now missing out on things to sit and tweet and facebook our thoughts? Are we missing out on our daughter’s soccer game to sit in the office on our computer and work, then use twitter as a distraction? Are we staying in instead of going out with friends to keep checking our facebooks? I feel like technology is taking over our lives and starting to control what we do. Our lives are short; I don’t want to spend mine in front of a computer screen.

Heather Bacon http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1603637,00.html "WHy everyone's talking about Twitter"

This article by Anita Hamiltion, talks about how Twitter is a simple way to blog for everyday normal people. She refers to Twitter as "microblogging or moblogging" because not everyone always has time to post a long thoughtful or silly blog, you just simply post what you are doing. The article discusses the basics of Twitter and how it works. Anita Hamilton states that //The chatter about Twitter escalated into a virtual roar two weeks ago during the South by Southwest multimedia festival in Austin, Texas// in which Twitter was named the best blogging site. Twitter has been successful and has 100,000 members and has been the top term on blog search engines.Hamilton believes that twitter will be more successful in the fact that it targets the same people Myspace, Facebook and Diggs targets. She supports her belief by referring to web users as cyberjunkies and stating that people who use different types of blogging and sites need the thrill of a new one. This article was interesting to me because I liked her ideas on why Twitter is a successful site. I thought it was interesting that she believes people involved in the digital world are lways looking for something better, easier and cooler to use. I think that the person who made twitter had a good mindset on the reaction people would have to its simplicity. Most people don't want to sit and write a page on their thoughts;they would rather tell there friends what the are doing, read what they are doing and move on with their day. This article made me think of how a website so plain gets as many users as it does. I am not a personal fan of twitter. Twitter, Myspace and Facebook are all generally the same thing except that someone decided to take an aspect of one site and base theirs on it. I don't believe there is any origionality or excitment in Twitter.

Callie McMurry

[|The Celebrity Twitter]

In this article by John Metcalfe discuss the world of twitter that has been overcome with hundreds of celebrities ranging from actors, singers, business magnates, politicians, professional athletes and writers. Twitter allows these stars to be like everyday people and discuss their random thoughts and actions of their day like like Solange Knowles talking about how she was taking a lot of NyQuil and then ended up passing out at the airport. These tweets can show the rest of the public how normal celebrities can be and how we can all relate in one way or another. Another popular way celebrities use twitter is to market themselves and their fame to their thousands of followers within in seconds. All people on twitter can be connected like never before being able to see and share private information with the rest of the world. I found this article to be very interesting because i think that twitter is an amazing tool for celebrities and other individuals looking to promote themselves in a fast and free way. Its crazy that in seconds a new artist can be created, a product be distributed and if a celebrity is eating a sandwich the entire world knows. For anyone doing research on twitter and how celebrities use is daily this article would be a great tool. It has a great graphic showing what celebrities follow each other and how it all ends up in one big tangled web.

[|New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets]__** Tiffany Richter In this article by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, they are talking about their research on Twitter, and how they found that men were starting to follow more men and in return, the tweets are diminishing. They based their research on gender, and ask themselves question based upon this. The researchers are confused about Twitters sole purpose as well. They wonder if it is a way to communicate with friends and a way to express yourself, or if it is simply a marketing tool? To answer this question, they took a sample of people on Twitter and examined how this people used the service. Once they got their results back, they then compared their information with other social networks. Their findings are as follows: “ in the 300,542 users sampled, 80% are followed by or follow at least one user. In comparison, 60-65% of other social networks’ members had at least one friend.” Heil and Piskorski came to the conclusion that “ the actual users, as opposed to the media at large, truly understand how Twitter works.” Although men and women follow a close number or people on Twitter, “men have 15% more followers than women.” Even though men have more followers, women hold the slight majority. “We found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we cross-referenced users' "real names" against a database of 40,000 strongly gendered names.” So this just proves that although women may not be followed as much, there are more women out there to follow. Even more interesting is who follows whom. “We found that an average man is almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results are shocking to me because it would seem that men would want to follow more women even though they didn’t know them at all, just to get to know them due to the potential possibilities. Twitter's usage is also different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. “Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.” I would think that this isn’t very common amongst any social network because the whole purpose of the network is to communicate and if the average is only one, this means no one is really sharing at all. At the same time there is a small section of users who are active. “Specifically, the top 10% of Twitter users accounted for produce over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network .” This is surprising to me as well because Twitter is supposed to be a place to communicate with friends and express anything you wish to share with others. I think that this research will help with the type on people on Twitter, along with gender questions, and amount of tweets.
 * __Twitter: Men Following Men

Twitter Marketing Effects Style of Writing [] By Samantha Bailey In this article about Twitter, it shows how people change their tweeting styles depending on what type of message they want to convey, who they want to reach through the message, and what identity they want to take on from the message. This artice focuses more on the marketing aspect of some businesses through Twitter, but it still explains how one has to think about how they are going to be recieved in the message they post. Writing ultimately accesses the unconscious mind and shows how a person is, or shows the many different ways one can communicate with certain groups of people. Through posting tweets to an audience, one can become a more interesting person by constantly expressing personal things they do, think or feel. The author of this artice, David Thomas, says that "the more you care about your audience and the better you understand the medium, the more likely you are to share information in a way that will be compelling, amusing or thought provoking". This is ultimately discussing the changes of identity people go through when they are connected to a large audience, but not physically connected. It's easier to express oneself openly in front of a computer than in front of a room full of people, like in a business meeting for instance. I agree with this review on how twitter acts as a medium that allows one to change the way they express themselves to a sort of a community. Even though it is easier to express onesself through writing than in front of a huge group of people in person, it still allows people to try on identities and not be judged or discriminated against immediately. I believe it's a way for people to discover what type of person they want to be in the world without having the emotional damage that one would recieve from a critical, in-person audience. When writing a tweet that one knows is going out to a large group of people, they tend to have to think about how they want to word their inner thoughts in a way that won't be offensive to anyone, will convey their true meaning and way of thinking, and will help people learn to think ahead of what they express in the world and how they will be percieved by others because of it. In order to function in the world, one needs to learn how to communicate effectively with others in a way that conveys the message they want to be recieved. Of course, just communicating through Twitter isn't going to cure anyone of insecurities they may have in front of people, or make deep, personal connections with people, but it is a way to share things that are important to individuals and may help one find themselves and create an identity that suits them. If anyone is writing about identity, this article will help them analyze the process of changing identities and the way people communicate through social media, like Twitter in this case. Also how people express themselves more openly online than in person in front of a lot of people, such as in a business meeting.

New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html By: Sarah Machado In this article, Bill Heil and Mikolaj suggest that men using twitter are almost twice as likely to follow another man than a woman and they have 15% more followers than a woman. As a result, there is less tweeting that occurs. Heil and Mikolaj also say that there is some confusion about the purpose of twitter. They don’t know if it is a way of talking to friends, a method of expressing yourself, or merely a marketing tool. It is surprising to me that men are following other men more than they are women. In my opinion, women tweet more than men so more people would want to follow women on twitter. According to this article, twitter is an exception to the activity on regular social networks because according to this article, “On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women.” Twitter may be an exception because the activity on it is very different than other social networks. “Among twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.” This means that most people who have a twitter get it to follow people to see what others are doing, rather than to share what they are doing. I think this article would help us make new discoveries about users based on their gender.

Leah Arreguin

I found an audio about the history of twitter. One of the co-founders of twitter, Even Williams talks about how he and his partner started this program and how it has grown to be a worldwide networking site. Twitter was created four years ago and in the beginning all they thought it would be was a networking place where people could send each other "simple status updates to friends". So, Twitter was launched in 2006. Even Williams goes on talking about Twitter and how it works, which is pretty simple you follow people and what they post and people follow you as well. Then he goes onto explaining that he never thought twitter would grow so much and in a way that make people feel so connected. He says that people share their daily life moments. This giving it a more humanly experience. Overall, Twitter and in general networking is a way of feeling that sense of being connected. Even Williams: Twittter