Â
                                                          Â
The Diffusion of Twitter
Twitter is currently one of the fastest growing social networking trends on the web. The service is becoming increasingly more symbolic of a tech oriented culture engaged in constant collaboration. In 2009 alone the network has grown more than 100%. Many current trends are indicating that Twitter could be well on its way to becoming one of the top social networks. This paper will examine twitters potential as a way of seeking and sharing information. The paper will also critique the status of twitters diffusion across the American social graph as a micro-blogging platform to broadcast what an individual is doing, thinking, or saying.
           Twitter is best described as a social networking tool and micro blogging service that enables the sharing of “brief snippets of information to a maximum of 140 characters†(Twitter.com). People on twitter update each other with a type of status update feature “similar to what is used in face book and MySpace†(Thechannelweb.com). Status updating is a way for members of a social network to share personal information by updating each other regularly on their whereabouts and activities. Status updates are about asserting your digital presence. On Twitter, updates are more frequent, have multidimensionality, and may number several per hour (optimizedstrategies.com). Twitter updates have a very different feel from them in comparison to a Facebook or linkedin in structural terms. The major reason is that
frequent updates is what Twitter’s main focus is, where as Facebook status updates are one part of a much larger platform for peer to peer sharing.
Twitter is easy to use; and if setup correctly, can be an informative, personalized feed. Â One of the services main features is the ability to fallow other users that are inside and outside of your social sphere. To fallow someone on Twitter means that you subscribe to that users updates, or tweets as they have come to be known. The standard criteria to choose to fallow a particular user are often decided on whether or not what that user posts is interesting information.
           Twitter is accessible through a number of different locations in ones digital life. It is available through a computer application, a webpage, or a mobile phone. Its interface allows users to post messages to be read anywhere within what is considered the twitterverse. Since Twitter is accessible over the internet, users aren’t tied to any one specific computer or location. Twitter posts are sent to a centralized web site, either directly or through an instant
messaging tool, text message, or by any number of third party clients that are currently available.
           Although the use of Twitter was slow in 2007, it has risen sharply during 2008 and continues to grow exponentially in 2009. Twitter is representative of a new line of communication tools, including handhelds and mobile communications platforms like the
Â
iPhone and Black-Berry that help to promote the value of information access and on the go
communications. Twitter’s main purpose is to increase the speed and flow of information among social groups in real time and to open up lines of communication across a distributed, mostly public network.
Twitter is by no means an overnight success; in fact twitter has been in development for over three years. Twitter was developed in the latter half of 2006 by Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Jack Dorsey while working at an online audio company called Odeo. Evan Williams began brainstorming a new social network system, “one that combined the best of instant messaging, text messaging and blogging†(npr). This new project was a collection of multiple web 2.0 services. “Jack Dorsey came up with the idea when he was writing software that provided real time status updates for taxi companiesâ€(microblogging.com). Twitter’s account simplicity, specific reliance on user generated content and an rss like feed subscription model worked to set the new service apart from others. In time, serious Twitter communities began to develop. The true potential of Twitter as a current awareness and information tool began to emerge in 2007 (NPR). Twitter also attracted the attention of corporations, governments, and other ways in which we think and work in the digital age.
           The main goal in building a network on Twitter is to fallow people who provide or update useful information. Think of the tweets between people as consisting of a wide range of applications and not just social aspects. Since everyone within Twitter exchanges posts to the simple question of “what are you doing†(twitter.com).
It’s important to note though that twitter in its self is a diffusion mechanism. In fact Twitters entire design structure allows a user to “tweet†important information and have that Â
information spread to all of the individual users that follow that person, thus diffusing the awareness of a possible new innovation through their social group. This concept of diffusion through twitter is just beginning to be realized. Beyond the rather voyeuristic and trivial appeal of following users on twitter, the service can be used to rapidly spread information across local groups or large sections of a population.Â
For example the United States could use twitter as an emergency alert system, allowing the majority of users on twitter to receive a mobile update on their cell phone alerting them of a possible threat. Local law enforcement could also use the service. This could allow for the possibility for users to localize there information and receive updates from their local emergency alert system. Currently CNN breaking news or @cnnbrk is one of the most followed user accounts on twitter with over one and a half million followers. CNN breaking news became such a popular account because the information distributed was short, to the point and only updated the most important world news events.
For example imagine a scenario similar to Paul Reveres midnight ride. At ten o’clock on the night of April 18th 1775 Paul Revere set out to distribute a very short but important piece of information “the British are coming†(Gladwell). This midnight ride allowed the local militia to prepare for the British. Within two hours he covered thirteen miles all the while stopping and
letting the town leaders know the news, and telling them to spread the news to others. This is
one of the best cases of a word of mouth epidemic (Gladwell). Consider that a similar scenario is occurring today but instead of going on a midnight ride, the crucial piece of information was
twittered to a vast number of people all at the same time. This type of word of mouth epidemic works very well on twitter. Information that is inherently sticky will propagate itself quickly through many different social circles on twitter. It’s said that the reason that Paul Reveres ride was so successful was to the fact that he himself was a connector and an opinion leader (Gladwell). He had connections with many different people that were in many different social groups. This type of word of mouth epidemic has already occurred on twitter. In fact one of the first updates from the Flight 1549 that crashed into the Hudson was from someone aboard a ferry that sent a photo of the plane in the Hudson to twitter.Â
Twitter goes beyond just a simple emergency alert system in terms of diffusion of ideas and innovation. The social network of twitter streamlines the essence of diffusion theory by incorporating the network of users to spread and distribute important information. Twitter has users that act as opinion leaders in certain topics and through twitter their status as an opinion leader is quantifiable by the number of twitter followers they have that are interested in that same subject. These opinion leaders are able to distribute information to the individuals that will have an interest in it.
The term micro-blogging came in to being to describe the new wave of services that allowed users to update profiles with blog like entries that contained small amounts of information including updates of what’s on the users mind or what the user is doing. It’s also worth considering that “micro-blogging is essentially, an extremely accessible form of publishing†(microblogging.com). Twitter is the foremost micro blogging service that exists; it         Â
should be mentioned that there are over one hundred other micro blogging services that exist using a similar format to twitter. These services include Jaiku, Pownce, Yammer and Plurk; though none of these services have seen the explosive adoption that twitter has seen in the last several months.
Twitter is currently in a state of massive adoption, each month the micro blogging service gains an exponential amount of users. Nielson said in its report that 13.9 million users joined Twitter in March, representing more than a 100 percent increase of unique visitors from March of 2008. However Twitter is showing an interesting trend that differs from the way that previous social networks did. Previous social networking giants like MySpace and Facebook were able to retain upward of “70 percent of the members that joined the respective services during these times of explosive growth.â€(thechannelweb.com) Reports from Nielsen ratings are showing that a majority of twitter adopters discontinue there use of the service, as many as 70 percent of adopters stop actively using the service after the first 90 days. This issue is one that twitter will have to face.
“Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent,” David Martin, Nielsen Online’s vice president of primary research, said in a Nielson blog post. “For most of the past 12 months, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.”
(the channel wire)
This information though does not necessarily properly account for the particular way twitter is used by its adopters. The article states that users who seemingly quit are not actively continuing to contribute to the social network. An underling use of twitter though is to follow other people that you find interesting. This is to say that even though the twitter users are not regularly posting tweets, they are still possibly actively receiving tweets from the users that they follow. Adopters of twitter will often be enticed to join by the number of celebrities that use twitter and have developed a twitter following rather than the direct network effect of benefiting from friends and family using the service. Currently the most followed individuals are all celebrities including Ashton Kutcher, Oprah, John Mayer, Ellen DeGeneres, and Ryan Seacrest. All of whom have well over a million followers.  Many people who choose to update regularly do so because a relatively small number of friends or family are using the service.
Twitter is currently one of the fastest growing social networking trends on the web.. The explosive growth over the last several months has shown that Twitter has the potential to
Â
diffuse through a large section of the population. With many different uses, this simple yet Â
diverse service will continue to grow and change in the months and years to come. The trend of micro blogging is just beginning to take off and the early adopters will be one step ahead of the trend. The service is becoming increasingly more symbolic of the tech oriented culture we are in that is engaged in constant communication and collaboration.