User Intentions in Twitter
5. DISCUSSION
Following section presents a brief taxonomy of user intentions on Twitter. The apparent intention of a Twitter post was determined manually by the first author. Each post was read and categorized. Posts that were highly ambiguous or for which the author could not make a judgement were placed in the category UNKNOWN. Based on this analysis we have found following are some of the main user intentions on Twitter:
- Daily Chatter Most posts on Twitter talk about daily routine or what people are currently doing. This is the largest and most common user of Twitter
- Conversations In Twitter, since there is no direct way for people to comment or reply to their friend’s posts, early adopters started using the @ symbol followed by a username for replies. About one eighth of all posts in the collection contain a conversation and this form of communication was used by almost 21% of users in the collection.
- Sharing information/URLs About 13% of all the posts in the collection contain some URL in them. Due to the small character limit a URL shortening service like TinyURL9 is frequently used to make this feature feasible.
- Reporting news Many users report latest news or comment about current events on Twitter. Some automated users or agents post updates like weather reports and new stories from RSS feeds. This is an interesting application of Twitter that has evolved due to easy access to the developer API.
“Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communitites,” Java, Finin, Song, Tseng (August 2007).
