Twitter

About

Twitter is a social networking^[1] and microblogging^[2] website where users can post small messages up to 140 characters long called tweets via the web, text, or mobile apps. People can subscribe to other users by following them individually or by following a Twitter list, which is composed of a group of authors. These messages can also be retweeted, which shares the tweet with another person’s followers, much like the Tumblr reblog function.

History

Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone. The website was conceived by Jack Dorsey, who introduced a prototype of the site for Odeo^[3] employees. It was made available to the public on July 15, 2006. Though launched nine months prior, Twitter did not see major traffic until March 2007 at that year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive.^[4]

Evan Williams noted that many of their early adopters were headed to the conference, so they took advantage of this by creating a tweet visualizer. Working with the SXSW staff, they paid $11,000 dollars to have flat panel screens in the hallways of the main venue.^[5] Conference goers could then text tweets to 40404 and see their messages on the screens around the venue.^[6] Users could then subscribe to each other, with new tweets delivered by SMS.

Traffic

At SXSW, Twitter won the 2007 Web Award^[7], and thanked the crowd in less than 140 characters. That year, approximately 5000 tweets were sent per day.^[8] In 2008, the amount of daily tweets sent shot up to to 300,000. The next year, approximately 35 million tweets were sent per day and in 2010, it nearly doubled to 50 million.^[8] These numbers fluctuate depending on the day, but the largest amount of tweets occur when large events occur, like celebrity deaths, major sporting events, or when big news stories break.

As of September 30th, 2011, Twitter has a global Alexa^[9] score of 9, a Compete^[10] rank of 22 with over 36 million unique visitors, and a Quantcast^[11] rank of 5.

Features

Tweets can be made with up to 140 characters. In tweets, several abbreviations are often seen:

RT: ReTweet. Used when repeating the same tweet as someone else.
OH: OverHeard. Used when posting something you overheard.
HT: Heard Through. Similar to OH, but not as popular. It’s used the same way as OH, except you would be repeating something that wasn’t actually tweeted.

There are many Twitter-specific functions^[12] but here are some of the most popular ones:

@: If @ is posted with a user’s name in a tweet (ex: “@knowyourmeme”), the message will function as a reply to that user. The message can only be seen by people who follow both the person who tweets the @ and the person who receives the @.
#: If # is posted with a word/phrase (ex. “#hashtag”), the word becomes a hashtag. The tweet can then be found by other people who search for that word. It can be used by people who have similar interests or hobbies, but also for temporary phenomena, like in the case of #Дождь
D: If “D” is posted before a user’s name in the form (D+space+username+message), the message will act as a direct message to the other user.

Highlights

Internet Phenomena

Since Twitter supports trending topics through hashtags, it is easy for an idea to spread quickly on the site. These include (but are not limited to) Pants Status, #дождь, Sometimes I Just Want To Copy Someone Else’s Status, and #AccordingToPalin.

Additionally, several memes have been popularized by hashtags like White Girl Problems and First World Problems.

There are several sites that track hashtags and other trending topics on Twitter, for example Tweetmeme^[13] and Trendistic.^[14]

Twitter has also played a huge role in many Anonymous operations, for example in #OccupyWallStreet and Operation Bart, where Twitter became one of the prime methods of assembly and information dissemination.

Finally, Twitter is the home of the Fail whale, which appears when Twitter is down or over capacity.

Twitter Introduces Redesign

Twitter announced a simplified, streamlined version of the site on December 8th, 2011.^[22] The redesign is a complete overhaul of the site^[23], offering a new homepage, with videos, photos, and conversations now embedded directly into a user’s personal tweet feed. User profiles are also restructured, with the Following and Followers tabs moved away from the tweet feed, which now features embedded videos and images, into a separate section.

Two new features were also introduced for a user’s homepage. The first, Connect, replaces both @ mentions and Activity tabs. The second, Discover, populates hashtag-centric news centered around the users you follow, location information, and global trending topics. Along with the redesign, Twitter announced brand pages, which allows companies to have larger banners as well as the ability to pin a Tweet to the top of their feed.^[24][25][26]

Twitter’s 2011 Review

On December 1st, 2011, Twitter began publishing a series of videos and infographics with the hashtag #YearInReview^[21] on their blog.

TPS (Tweets Per Second) Peaks^[20]

• December 31st, 2010: Japanese New Years Eve / 6,939 tweets per second

• February 6th, 2011: Super Bowl XLV / 4,064 tweets per second

• March 11th, 2011: Tōhoku Earthquake in Japan / 5,530 tweets per second

• May 2nd, 2011: Osama bin Laden’s Death 5,106 tweets per second

• July 17th, 2011: Women’s World Cup Final / 7,196 tweets per second

• August 24th, 2011: East Coast Earthquake / 5,500 tweets per second

• August 28th, 2011: Beyonce’s Pregnancy / 8,868 tweets per second

• December 9th, 2011: Screening of Japanese movie Castle in the Sky / 25,088 tweets per second.^[27][28]

• January 8th, 2011: Tim Tebow’s 80-yard overtime touchdown pass becomes the most tweeted sport event in America / 9,420 tweets per second.

Criticisms

Censorships

Twitter has censored hashtags on a number of occasions after users complained that they found the them offensive, such as #Thatsafrican, #thingsdarkiessay and #ReasonstoBeatYourGirlfriend among others.

• In China, access to the microblogging service has been blocked intermittently. In the second half of 2009, access to Twitter and Facebook were blocked presumably due to concerns of social and political commentaries and protest organizations during the Ürümqi riots in July 2009. In 2010, Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo became a censored topic on Twitter after he won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.

• In Egypt, Twitter was inaccessible in January 2011 during the Egyptian protests. Many news reporters on the site blamed the government for blocking access while Egypt’se mobile network provider Vodafone denied any involvement in the temporary block. In the United Kingdom, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown threatened to shut down the microblogging service in response to the riots in 2011, though it was never implemented.

• In South Korea, the government tried to block access to the Twitter account @uriminzok, which was launched by the North Korean government in August 2010. After acquiring over 9,000 followers in less than a week, the account was banned by South Korea’s state-run Communications Standards Commission for broadcasting “illegal information.”

#TwitterBlackOut

On January 26th, 2012, Twitter announced in a blog post^[31] about a new policy that will allow censorship of its content in accordance with the domestic laws of the countries where it is in service.

The blog post also pointed out that it will take such actions “in response to […] a valid and applicable legal request.” Upon processing a complaint, Twitter would notify users in the affected region that they may not see certain content due to specific legal reasons and records of complaints will be publicly available through Chilling Effects’ Cease & Desist Database.^[34]

   

With the heightened tension surrounding the issue of online censorship (see: Stop Online Piracy Act and Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) The decision was met by negative responses on Twitter and elsewhere online, spurring angry #Outrage comments and talks about #TwitterBlackout, a day-long boycott of the service on January 28th.

The international free speech NGO Reporters Without Borders also expressed disappointment in a letter^[32] to the Jack Dorsey, emphasizing the important role of the service as an organizational tool in repressive countries.

“We urge you to reverse this decision, which restricts freedom of expression and runs counter to the movements opposed to censorship that have been linked to the Arab Spring, in which Twitter served as a sounding board.”

The news of Twitter’s policy change and the reaction were covered by major daily publications and news blogs across the world. The New York Times^[33] described the decision as a “coming-of-age” moment for the company that has quickly matured from a San Francisco start-up to a global communications service.

Research

Several studies have been done breaking down what types of tweets are made and how what people are tweeting represents cycles of human emotion.

“Meformers” vs. “Informers”

Two Rutgers University professors, Mor Naaman and Jeffery Boase, divided Twitter users into two major categories in 2009: “Meformers” (users who tweet about their everyday lives and feelings) and “Informers” (users who use the site to share information and news).^[15] 80% of Twitter users fall into the Meformer category, with a median of 61 friends and 43 followers. The median Informer, however, was found to have 131 friends and 112 followers.^[16]

The study also broke down tweets into 9 different types:

The study used a sample of 3379 tweets, finding that that 22% of them were under the Information Sharing category and 41% were the Me Now category, bursts of thought about the users life with little to no context.

Pear Analytics

In August 2009, Pear Analytics^[17] published a similar report, dividing tweets into six categories:

Pear had a sample of 2000 tweets and found that the most popular category was “Pointless Babble,” with 41% of tweets from the sample. The next popular were conversational tweets, with 38% of the sample being in that category.

Happiness During the Day

A study by sociologists at Cornell University published in September 2011 used Twitter to help determine when people are the happiest.^[18][19]

Using a sample of over 500 million public tweets made between February 2008 and January 2010, Scott Golder and Michael Macy analyzed tweets by how positive and negative words were used, in addition to emoticons. The found that positive posts peaked daily in the morning and after dinner, with users’ overall moods being the lowest at the beginning of the workweek.

Happiness Between 2009 and 2011

In December 2011, researchers at the University of Vermont published a study^[29] in which they analyzed patterns of happiness, similar to the Cornell research published earlier that year. However, they looked more at the pattern of how positive words were used over the course of three years rather than just at a workweek. They found that the general happiness of Twitter users peaked in April 2009^[30] and has fallen sharply in the past two years. The researchers found that some of the saddest moments in Twitter history have included news of the 2009 swine flu, Michael Jackson’s death, Patrick Swayze’s death, the ending of LOST and Germany beating England in the 2010 World Cup.

Average happiness on Twitter, charted by the day of the week.

Search Interest

Search for Twitter started picking up in early 2009 and has been climbing since.

External References