Tw i t t e r : W h a t C a n W e L e a r n f r o m M i c r o -

Blogging?

A White Paper by FluffyLogic Development Ltd

http://www.fluffylogic.net

Introduction

This paper looks at Twitter, the micro-blogging, social networking service, to see what we
can glean from the collective voices it aggregates. Twitter has becomes a household
name. It has grown rapidly over the last few years, in its aims, the service it offers, and in
its public and media profile1. Much has been written about Twitter and it's users; some
negative, some positive. So, the central question of this paper is; what can we learn from
Twitter and it's micro-blogging system?

Prior to focusing on the central question it is worth defining Twitter and the related terms
that are used. Twitter is has its headquarters in San Francisco, USA. It was founded in
2006 and now has around 70 employees. The original incarnation of Twitter was as a
podcasting company, however, in 2005 it was feeling the pressure of competition, and the
management felt the need to reinvent themselves. They set about by holding a series of
brain-storming sessions. Out of those brain-storming sessions 'Odeo Inc.' became
'Twitter', and podcasting gave way to micro-blogging.2

Central to their shift was that they now saw themselves as existing at the cross-over point
between the web and mobile, illustrated by the following; there is a 140 character limit, the
site is simple to use and there is a low threshold to joining. Their service; the idea of a
simple post outwards to the Internet/mobile devices which kept fellow users updated about
status/thoughts/ideas etc. became known as micro-blogging. The social-network
component, while not a new idea, is important to the process. It comes from the ability of
users to 'follow' each other, in much the same way as one adds friends on Facebook,
Bebo or MySpace. However, the key difference between Twitter and Facebook (and a
very important point, as we will see later) is that what users communicate in Twitter (known

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
2 http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/
as a tweet, as in 'what users tweet...') is open to the public by default, whereas in
Facebook these comments are only open to that user's friends.3 Also of note is the idea of
the hash-tag – this is where users add the hash '#' symbol to the start of a word, e.g.
#bristol,4 which groups tweets by that subject. There is no creation process to a hash-tag,
users just add the character as and when they see fit, with repeated usage of terms and
ideas actually building a shared common conception.

The Pulse of the Planet

Recently, Twitter had the

misfortune to have many of it's
internal documents and emails
leaked onto the internet.
What these documents
showed is how Twitter views
itself, both now and in the
future. A revealing slide from
a February 2009 strategy
meeting showed how the
management believe that once Twitter hits the 1 billion users point they will have captured
the 'pulse of the planet'.5 Whilst this is a construct, and no guarantee of how others may
see Twitter, it does raise the first question about what Twitter and it's users can tell us.
'Pulse' implies a simple, singular point of measurement that offers a view into a larger and
more complex system, much as the pulse of a person can tell you information regarding
their health etc. How accurate a 'pulse' is Twitter?

The number of users is a key point, for without a significant base of users the concept of
the 'pulse' falls apart. Twitter's growth has been staggering; until the end of 2008 the site
had grown 752% to around 4.5 million users.6 By the end of 2009 this number was
projected to be 18 million users and is forecast to be around 26 million users by the end of
2010.7 However, Twitter is still small compared to other social networks sites such as

3 It is hard to see recent Facebook changes to their services as anything else but motivated by competition with
Twitter; http://techdirt.com/articles/20100110/1518217687.shtml
4 http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/49309
5 http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet/
6 http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/twitter-growth-2008/
7 http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007271
Facebook, which has around 250 million users worldwide:8 though Twitter is still growing
fast9 What is also interesting is the percentage of overall Internet users that these figures
represent.

Year Percentage of Internet users also using Twitter

(figures are US users, 2009/10 projected)10
2008 3.80%
2009 11.10%
2010 15.50%

This means that the 'pulse' is becoming a sizeable percentage of the overall user-base,
does this mean that is Twitter is starting to genuinely reflect what users are thinking and
doing?

T r e n d i n g To p i c s

So, what does all this traffic translate into in terms of data volume? Recently, FluffyLogic
have developed a system that taps into the raw Twitter feed to gather data about areas of
interest. Our first application of this system was to gather and rank data about what
iPhone games users thought were worthy of attention, the result was TopTweetGames. 11
During our development of the TopTweets system, however, we noticed some interesting
information about the amount of raw data this pulse generates 12:
• Total tweets per minute from Twitter: 18,000
• Total number of tweets per minute about iPhone games: 164 (of which on average 3
contain data of use to us for TopTweetGames)
• Around 70% of TopTweetGames entries are from distinct users: 13,104 users
contributed to 18,739 entries.

As can be seen from these figures, only 3 of the 18,000 tweets had information that we
deemed important enough to score. This is a ratio of 6000:1. Clearly, there is a huge
amount of information, but it is making sense of all this data and distilling into a form that
8 http://mashable.com/2009/09/14/twitter-2009-stats/
9 http://mashable.com/2009/03/16/twitter-growth-rate-versus-facebook/
10 2009 and 2010 are projected: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007271
11 http://www.toptweets.mobi/
12 The data generated is from January 2009. These figures represent a snap-shot of Twitter in action; the number
varies from time of day and day of the week and will probably have increased by the time you read this due to
Twitter's ongoing growth rate!
makes sense, that is the challenge.

Twitter has made use of this mass of data by creating the concept of 'Trending Topics';
when enough users are interested in the same topic
and write about it, the collected aggregation of that
area of interest becomes a trend. 'Trending Topics' is
of note because it is displayed in the side-bar of many
users, thus creating a positive-feedback loop where
users reinforce the topic thanks to its visibility.
Trending Topics are often major news items but they
can also be social aggregations, for example, the ever
popular #nowplaying hash-tag where users report on
the music they are currently listening to and add the
hash-tag. By tapping into the stream of this tag one
can see hundreds of tweets telling you what music is
being listened to around the globe right now: is this
the pulse of our listening habits?13 The challenge is,
of course, to gather meaningful data from such a rapid
stream of diverse information.

W h o i s Twe e t i n g ?

The next point that needs to be considered is whether the people tweeting are
representative of the population as a whole. In the table below there is a comparison
showing the age grouping of Twitter users globally compared to the same for the UK
population:

Age Group Twitter Population14 UK Population15

% %
15-19 31 6
20-24 35 6
25-29 15 6.5
30-34 7 7.5

13 Have a look at: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nowplaying

14 http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007250
15 Approximate percentages from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/pyramids/images/UK.gif
 35-39 4 7.5
40-44 3 7
45-49 2 6
50-54 2 7
55-60 1 5.5

This shows that, generally, the tweeting population is much younger than the UK
population. Although this is somewhat of a projection, there seems to be little evidence to
suggest that the global figures for Twitter are out of sync with the UK ones.

In addition, the range of people using Twitter is hugely varied. Any group of users, with a
need to communicate and with access to mobiles and the Internet, seems to be using it.
Groups using it range from the emergency services eg Los Angeles Fire Department use it
to inform the public of serious events and gangs use it to criticise rivals and arrange
fights16.

There are currently a couple of hurdles that get in the way of getting a clear picture of the
user-base; unless a user specifies a location on their homepage, it is not clear where they
are actually based and even then, they may not be there and they can lie. Twitter recently
acquired another technology company, Mixer Labs, who specialise in geo-location tagging
technology.17 It seems obvious, therefore, that Twitter wish to add location based
information to their service. During the recent protests in Iran Twitter users were
encouraged to change their reported locations to Iran, regardless of their actual location,
this was intended to confuse the Iranian authorities, making it unclear which users were in
Iran and which were outside the country.18

Summary

In summary, it is clear that while Twitter does not match the population demographics, it is
a diverse and rapidly growing publicly available source of knowledge. This knowledge
ranges from the mundane to the vital, from individual thoughts to collective outpourings.

16 Emergency management use: http://www.emergencymgmt.com/safety/Emergency-Managers-and-First.html

Gangs using Twitter: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/11/29/2009-11-
29_tweet_gangs_of_new_york_thugs_use_twitter_to_trashtalk_plan_fights.html

17 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_acquires_mixer_labs.php
18 http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10265462-2.html
For those wishing to make sense of the 18,000+ per minute tweets, the challenges are in
determining which of the multitude of users and tweets carry pertinent information. What
this shows us is that, although much of what is tweeted is mundane, collectively it
represents a huge slice of human experience happening live, all day, everyday. We must
also acknowledge that 'mundane' is a value judgement, and what is mundane to one is of
great interest to another.19

19 http://techdirt.com/articles/20100108/0325337671.shtml