Why We twitter: An analysis of a microblogging community

Abstract

Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. We present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of the social network in Twitter, one of the most popular microblogging systems. We find that people use microblogging primarily to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. We present a taxonomy characterizing the the underlying intentions users have in making microblogging posts. By aggregating the apparent intentions of users in implicit communities extracted from the data, we show that users with similar intentions connect with each other. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.