Tag Archives: Twitter

Twitter Study Reveals Interesting Results About Usage

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Ok, so the folks at Pear Analytics did an analysis of 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) dividing them into 6 categories.  They found that the largest percentage of tweets were “pointless babble,” 40.55% of the total tweets captured.  “Conversational was a very close second at 37.55%, and Pass-Along Value was third (albeit a distant third) at 8.7% of the tweets captured.”

Read more about the results at the site, and download the full whitepaper here.

But while I can’t go so far as to say I am “irritated” by such studies as Hugh McGuire does in an August 16th posting, I do agree when he says,

Every time someone complains about Twitter, or microblogging, blogging, the Web or anything else being overrun with “useless” information, I always have the same reaction: you could say the same thing about talking, but no one ever questions whether talking is useful or not.
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These are means of communication, used by humans to communicate, each with their own idiosyncrasies, but all driven by the same impulses that have always driven humans to communicate: the urge to connect, to find, to babble, to sell, to buy, to share, to romance, to complain, etc etc etc…

Twitter, or microblogging in general, will bring profound changes to some of its users (it has for me) in how they find/consume/interact with information and other people. As did the printing press, papyrus, the ballpoint pen, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, email, blogs, youtube, mobile phone, among others.

The interesting question is how these things change our informational and social interactions; but the question of whether or not these “new” tools are “good” or “valuable” are moot.

Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians

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In a recent SF Gate Open Forum Post, Cyrus Farivar, a freelance technology journalist from California, looks at the ways in which technology has been used as a tool in the pro-democracy movement, official efforts to thrwart that, and technology developments that had made it more difficult for them to do so. He writes

But now that Iran has been experiencing turmoil surrounding its recent election, many Bay Area technology leaders finally realize the importance their technology and services can play in shaping world events. As foreign media have been kicked out of the country, information technology services suddenly have become a crucial tool to get and receive information from Iran.

Twitter famously received a call from the U.S. Department of State nearly two weeks ago asking the company to postpone its scheduled maintenance to suit those in Tehran’s time zone, rather than those on Pacific time.

Facebook recently added Persian language support for its iconic social networking site. Google took things to an entirely new level by launching its Persian version of Google translate, which allows for decent machine translation between English and Persian and vice versa. But why this newfound attention to the Persian language (and Iran) took so long remains a mystery. Google’s translation capability for Estonian even came online before Persian.

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So instead of superficial support, like Twitter users changing their avatars to green to support Iran’s reformist movement, Silicon Valley minds and money should pool resources as a way to help Iranians get around this information blockade by providing easier-to-use proxies, anonymizers and maybe even unfiltered Internet access through hardware.

Long-range Wi-Fi, 3G, satellite or other wireless communications devices from Iran’s neighboring countries or even the Persian Gulf could be used to get faster and better information in and out of Iran. One Arizona company, Space Data, even advertises the capability to use helium-filled balloons to provide Internet and mobile phone access. Much of Iran could theoretically be covered with one or two such balloons.

All of that may sound crazy, but not helping Iranian reformers at their darkest hour would be even crazier.

Read the whole article at: Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians, the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Wired Campus – Think You’re Happy? Song Lyrics May Have the Answer – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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How can we track how happy we are? Just look at blogs and song lyrics, two professors say.

Peter S. Dodds and Christopher M. Danforth, a mathematician and a computer scientist from the University of Vermont, downloaded more than 230,000 songs composed since 1960, along with 2.3 million blog items posted to WeFeelFine.org since August 2005, and State of the Union addresses. Using a nine-point “happiness” scale for words from the Affective Norms for English Words study, they looked for what sentences using the word “feel.”

Their results are reported this week in the Journal of Happiness Studies in an article titled “Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents.”

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It is an intriguing study.

Mr. Danforth thinks data on happiness could help in the future. “A gross national happiness index could help design public policy and understand people’s reactions,” he says.

For their next project, the two professors are looking at people’s Twitter accounts, taking in 1,000 tweets per minute. Unlike blogs, which are typically daily reflections, tweets are constantly updated and can show people’s immediate feelings, Mr. Dodds says.

Read more at The Wired Campus