Microblogging: Twitter

Seitzhan Madiyev

The Information Technology industry has been surprising us slightly. After the creation of Google search engine and the “internet bubble” crisis in 2000s, it began developing a little bit slower and in different direction than many expected. People were predicting about future IT industry; how it will change the way we live. As the time has passed trends that were predicted in that time did not achieve their expectations, or simply did not get enough attention from the community. But instead other projects came into place; those which most of the people did not even think about ten years ago, but without which a lot of people cannot imagine their lives nowadays. The top trend of this decade was given to a group of products that can be called “social networks”. And between monstrous creation of Mark Zuckerberg and a huge failure of “MySpace” there was one more invention which I believe will have an even greater impact in the nearest future “Twitter”.

How it works
Twitter is a simple microblogging service which allows users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters. When a user wants to read public messages sent by another user of his interest, he/she simply connects to it through a button named “follow”. And those who follow the user will get all the messages sent by him. It was firstly described by its creators as a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. When people create an account there, the site simply asks you to share with others “What are you doing?”.

Socio-political significance
Twitter was often criticized for uselessness since its users were bringing a lot of “rubbish” and meaningless information, like “I ate a sandwich”. However, since 2008 the project took an important socio-political significance. In February 16, 2008 the photographer James Buck was arrested by Egyptian police. He wrote “arrested” in his twitter account which quickly came to the US authorities. The next day he was released. During the U.S. presidential elections Twitter was actively used by both candidates Barack Obama and John McCain for their campaigns. It was blocked in many countries for the purpose of not spreading information of some events.
When the management team understood the importance of their service, they have changed the business model the question has been changed to “What’s happening?”. The society started to realize the importance of the project. It became the fastest media platform to release the latest news and updates on almost all events occurring in the world. Now even media outlets are forced to get the newest information from Twitter with the risk of reporting false information. It has become the most efficient media platform, since all people who have an account there have become the reporters.

A lot of people argue that most of the messages that occur in twitter are so called “Pointless Babble”. So the research has been made to analyze what people actually share with others, and the results were interesting. Pointless Babble won with 40.55% of the total tweets captured; however, 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. (Twitter Study) Pass-Along Value is the messages that actually matter; those are the newest news, relevant information and shares of interesting thoughts by famous politicians, business people, etc. Although it is only 8.7%, but it is still large in general terms since around 200 million tweets are sent every day.

New business model
Twitter has created an absolutely new way for businesses to promote their products and for people to promote themselves. Since 2000s marketing has been moving more and more towards the Internet, and just few years ago so called “social networks” helped to create new business models and increase the efficiency of marketing. One of the most important tools created because of social network is the “target marketing”. It simply allows businesses to find the right audience to promote to dividing all the users by different groups. But if social networks like Facebook are efficient platform for targeting adverts, how Twitter has created a new way? It is simple: “Brand Journalism”.

Nowadays adverts don’t get enough attention from public and become less and less efficient, and that is where brand journalism might come in the nearest future. Brand journalism was created as a tool to promote products and companies in an innovative way. A company can hire a professional journalist which can write only about this company, its everyday activities, new products, the chronicles of what has happened. People are interested to hear new stories, and Twitter is an ideal platform to tell those stories, to share photos and links.

I believe that Twitter has not achieved its peak yet, and it has more to come in the future. From being on of the most innovative products of these years, it might become an essential part of our lives.

References

1. MG Siegler. Russian President Medvedev Sends His First Tweet At Twitter. — TechCrunch, 23.06.2010
2. Chris Nuttall. What’s happening? A lot, says Twitter COO. — The Financial Times Tech blog (blogs.ft.com/techblog), 20.11.2009
3. Twitter: "pointless babble" or peripheral awareness + social grooming? — Danah Boyd blog (www.zephoria.org), 16.08.2009
4. Owen Fletcher, Dan Nystedt. Internet, Twitter Blocked in China City After Ethnic Riot. — PC World, 06.06.2009
5. Om Malik. A Brief History of Twitter. — Gigaom.com, 01.02.2009
6. BBC admits it made mistakes using Mumbai Twitter coverage. — The Guardian, 05.12.2008
7. Claudine Beaumont. New York plane crash: Twitter breaks the news, again. — The Telegraph, 16.01.2009
8.  John Brandon. Barack Obama wins Web 2.0 race. — ComputerWorld, 19.08.2008
9. Twitter Study. — Pear Analytics. — August 2009

Microblogging -- Twitter & Sina Weibo

Liu Songling

Introduction

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets", and images.

Sina Weibo (Chinese: 新浪微博; literally "Sina microblogging") is a Chinese microblogging site. Akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, it is one of the most popular sites in China, in use by well over 30% of internet users, it has a similar market penetration that Twitter has established in the USA.

Rapid Development

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."

Sina Weibo was launched by SINA Corporation in August 2009, and now has more than 200 million registered users. A two-year-old block on Twitter setting being accessible in China has allowed Sina’s homegrown Weibo to flourish - and now it’s blossoming in to far more than a Twitter-style microblogging tool.

Social influence

a. Twitter

As one of the most popular social network sites in the world and with more than 10 languages in used, Twitter has an indisputable influence in both the daily life of humans and issues of the society.

Nowadays, people spend an increasing time chatting online or with cell-phones, with great interest in what their friends or some other famous people are doing. Thus as a convenient internet posing wall for users to update their moods, status just via text-based posts, twitter not only provides the commenting and chatting services like Facebook, but also let users become “followers”, which enable users know not only their friends’ status but also other famous people,  their interested companies, organization and so on.

“Followers” in twitter, like fans or supporters, by leaving comments or reply to a status can somehow show their supports or arguments, and can even reflect the public opinion on a certain social event. For example, in August, 2009, when the opponents of Obama’s health care reform plan aggressed the National Health System (NHS) of UK, thousands of the users of NHS used the #welovetheNHS label in twitter to support NHS and refute the campaign of U.S.Right, winning the Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s support and respect.

b. Sina Weibo

Owning similar services with Twitter, Sina Weibo, though established only 2years ago, now also has a great influence in the society. Mainly used by people in China, the impact of Sina Weibo largely focuses on the care of the life of people. People in Sina Weibo not only share some advice and tips of daily life, but also warm-heartedly post some advertisement on emergent need of hospitals and disaster area. For instant, the reason why Yao Chen becomes the Queen of Weibo is not just the humor language she used in her post, but her consistent post for the people in urgent need for help. People love to see that famous Weibo owners take advantage of their large amount of fans to help others with widely advertising instead of promoting products.

Also, like news broadcasting, Weibo users report and describe the real situation of big events and disasters, enable people in the nation get the fastest information. For example, in the disaster of the train crash in Wenzhou China, on 23rd July, 2011, people post the condition of the crash and the people injured in Weibo, which was more informative and timely than TV news report.

Advertising effectiveness

a. Twitter

While hesitation over making purchases for products through the networking sites has abated, what along with the widely use of Twitter, of course, is the great profit from advertisements. While Facebook may take the lion's share of social media marketing budgets, Twitter is fast catching up and eMarketer has estimated that worldwide advertising revenues will rise by 210 per cent by the end of this year. This represents moving from $45 million (£28.7 million) earnings in 2010 to an expected $139.5 million (£88.9 million) by the end of 2011. The marketing analysts also forecast that Twitter's worldwide ad revenues will reach $400 million (£255 million) by 2013.

Also, economic advantages come from the cooperation between mobile phones and Twitter. For example, Samsung announced the launching of Galaxy S, a Smartphone manufactured by Samsung, in Korea in detail via the Twitter. Usages like these certainly helped people in terms of receiving information quickly. This not only enables people to use Twitter with smartphones at anytime in anywhere, but also decrease the cost of communication. It is estimated that over half of Twitter users use their webpage by mobile devices. While other online services such as blogs and MSN Messenger require people to be stationed, Twitter can be accessed while moving. Moreover, other online communication systems such as MSN Messenger ask users to sign in. This means that people have to stay in their seats in order to use the system, which is a huge inconvenience.

b. Sina Weibo

Via such kind of social network, not only companies advertise their products by posting ads, but users publicize the products they love by showing their pictures and comments. Recently, it has become a trend that users would love to post what they have bought and what they have eaten on Sina Weibo, which then cause a great popularity of the product or the restaurant that is appreciated and forwarded by many other users. Since people would rather believe what their peers and friends preferences, thus the effectiveness of such advertising may much more powerful than TV ads. 

Conclusion

Though I just talk about the development, social influence and advertising effectiveness above, there are many other information and benefits of these two social networks. However, apart from their advantages, they also have their respective limitation. For instant, Twitter has no constant, long-term income source, which makes it hard to decide whether to choose the profit from companies’ advertisement or the users’ favors, as it may worsen the perception of users about twitter if it intentional creates a platform for advertisements. Also, Sina Weibo only has Chinese version which greatly limits its development and expansion. 

Reference

1. http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sina_Weibo
3. http://www.equimedia.co.uk/index.php?id=98&article=800744322
4. http://ahnyoungjae.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/economic-benefits-and-limitations-of-twitter-and-the-future/

Microblogging

Wong Kwan Ting

Introduction
Recent years, microblogging is very popular all over the world. Microblogging is a type of blogging, but it has a small scale than blogging. In a microblog, users are only allowed to post small content within 140 words or a photo only. Nowadays, it is more and more convenient to surf the Internet everywhere. People are able to connect to the Internet by their smart phones and they can update their microblogs no matter where they are. The most famous companies which provide microblogging services include Twitter, Weibo and Plurk.

History of Microblogging
The history of microblogs starts from 2005 and it was called tumblelogs at that time. It was a simpler type of blog which was a quick and good platform to publish people’s work on the Internet. After one year, the term “microblogs” was used by Twitter instead of “tumblelogs”. Then, more and more companies start to provide microblogging services and each of the providers has its own characteristics. For instance, Plurk has a timeline view which shows the statuses, photos and videos of the user in a form of timeline. This helps people share information and news more quickly and efficiently. Due to the fast development of the sharing platforms on the Internet, the Internet has become a place where breaking news and new ideas come out. The news and ideas can usually spread all over the world after a short period of time.

Benefits of Microblogging to the Business
The main characteristic of microblogging is the function “follow”. The microblog users are able to follow other users so that the most updated statuses or photos are pushed to the followers’ news feeds. The followers are able to choose what updates they want to get. Moreover, as microblogs are mainly public to all people, microblogging is a very good platform to promote business. Because of the popularity of microblogging, a lot of corporations, such as Dell, Apple and Microsoft, have microblogs on Twitter or other microblogging service providers to deliver their exclusive news or most updated products and services to the public. For instance, Microsoft posted a video of the new Xbox Live Experience on their Twitter recently. The video is just like an advertisement or a TV commercial on the Internet but it is totally free of charge. The companies do not need to pay a cent to publicize their products and services on the microblogs. The microblogs are also good places for marketing and public relations. The Sysomos study reveals that the group of marketers is more active than general users on Twitter. 15% of the marketers follow more than 2000 people but only 0.29% of the general users follow more than 2000 people. [1] Apart from companies, the film stars and singers from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland China are very common to use Weibo to share their daily life to their fans. Through microblogs, the stars are able to promote their recent work. Furthermore, they can build up a good image to their fans and the public. This could help them attract more opportunities on working. Hence, microblogging is also a great and convenient promotion platform to the public figures.

Privacy and Security on Microblogging
Apart from the benefits that microblogging brings, there are some issues which we need to aware. For instance, privacy is a main concern on microblogging. The users of microblogs may post some personal information such as telephone numbers or addresses on their microblogs. As their microblogs may be seen by the public, the personal information may spread at a very fast rate. Moreover, it is not secure even if the users set up privacy on their microblogs. For instance, Google’s Buzz platform automatically publicizing their users’ email contacts as followers in 2010. [2] This aroused a controversy to the users and Google later edited the settings. Besides, hackers may have access to the server of the microblogging service providers and steal the users’ information. As a result, the users of microblogs should not rely on the providers very much and they should be careful before posting their personal information on their microblogs.

Freedom of Speech on Microblogging
The freedom of speech on the microblogs is also a concern on society. This issue mainly affects the users of microblogs in the mainland China, especially the users of Weibo. For instance, Weibo would filter the posts or photos which are related to the June Fourth Incident or sensitive information considering the Chinese government. The Internet should be a platform which allows every one expressing their opinions and ideas freely. The action of deleting statuses is very annoying to the users since they are not allowed to express what they are thinking. This matter leads to a controversy to the microblog users and the microblogging service providers. It is also a new social issue to society in Hong Kong and the mainland China.

Conclusion
In conclusion, microblogging help us spread our ideas and the news to the world more quickly. More and more people are able to exchange their information via microblogs. Nonetheless, the convenience may lead to some side-effects. The privacy and security of microblogs are still doubtful to the users. Furthermore, freedom of speech on microblogs also leads to a controversy on society in recent years. We should identity the benefits and demerits of microblogging and think twice on how we use microblogs.

References

1. Inside Twitter: An In-depth Look Inside the Twitter World. Sysomos; 2009-06-10. Retrieved 2009-06-23.
2. Google Buzz redesigned after privacy complaints. The Telegraph (London); February 15, 2010. Retrieved March 25, 2010.