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Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.

Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter

Courtenay Honeycutt Susan C. Herring
Indiana University Bloomington Indiana University Bloomington
clhoneyc@indiana.edu herring@indiana.edu


Abstract

The microblogging service Twitter is in the process
of being appropriated for conversational interaction
and is starting to be used for collaboration, as well. In
order to determine how well Twitter supports user-to-
user exchanges, what people are using Twitter for, and
what usage or design modifications would make it
(more) usable as a tool for collaboration, this study
analyzes a corpus of naturally-occurring public Twit-
ter messages (tweets), focusing on the functions and
uses of the @ sign and the coherence of exchanges.
The findings reveal a surprising degree of conversa-
tionality, facilitated especially by the use of @ as a
marker of addressivity, and shed light on the limita-
tions of Twitter’s current design for collaborative use.

1. Introduction

Twitter—a web-based microblogging service that
allows registered users to send short status update mes-
sages to others—is a new social software phenomenon
that is attracting attention from the popular press [2,
12] and, increasingly, from scholars [8, 9]. Launched
in the fall of 2006, Twitter has grown rapidly in popu-
larity in recent months. Compete.com reports that from
February to April 2008, U.S. traffic to the site nearly
doubled to approximately 1.2 million people per month
[3]. Twitter is also popular in other parts of the world,
including Japan, Europe, and South America [17].
The stated purpose of Twitter is for users to answer
the question: “What are you doing?” [15]. However, in
Mischaud’s [9] study of 5,767 Twitter messages,
58.5% of the messages did not address this question. In
an alternative appropriation, a growing number of peo-
ple are using Twitter to interact with others, sometimes
in extended exchanges—even though the site was not
designed primarily for such use. To facilitate their ex-
changes, Twitter users have innovated a novel use of
the familiar “@” sign as a marker of addressivity [16],
as in @courosa to indicate that a message (or “tweet”)
is addressed to the user ID courosa.
One potentially important role for person-to-person
interaction via Twitter is collaboration. Twitter already
is being used to disseminate information in institutional
settings and to connect groups of people in critical
situations [17]. Given its flexibility of access and
lightweight architecture, Twitter also has the potential
to be used for sharing ideas and coordinating activities,
similar to instant messaging [13], yet more dynamic.
There is some evidence that this potential is already
being realized. Odden [10], in an informal blog poll,
found that 2% of respondents reported using Twitter
for “group and project communication.” However,
Odden’s data rely on a convenience sample, visitors to
his blog. More in-depth study is needed to assess the
collaboration occurring via Twitter. Such research
should focus on the ease and sustainability of user-to-
user exchanges, since the ability to converse is a basic
requirement for collaboration. Thus we ask: How well
does Twitter support user-to-user exchanges, what are
people using Twitter for, and what usage or design
modifications would be required to make it (more)
usable as a tool for collaboration?
We address these questions by analyzing conversa-
tional exchanges on the Twitter public timeline, focus-
ing on the functions and uses of the @ sign. The find-
ings reveal that despite a “noisy” environment and an
interface that is not especially conducive to conversa-
tional use, short, dyadic exchanges occur relatively
often, along with some longer conversations with mul-
tiple participants that are surprisingly coherent. These
conversations are facilitated in large measure by use of
the @ sign as a marker of addressivity (i.e., to direct a
tweet to a specific user) and the ability to “follow”
other users, which aid users in tracking conversations.
In light of this evidence, we consider the suitability of
microblogging tools for collaboration and advance
recommendations for enhancing their design to better
promote conversation and collaboration.

2. Background

2.1. Twitter

Twitter was created by a San Francisco-based 10-
person start-up called Obvious and launched in Octo-
ber 2006. Users send messages (called “tweets”)—
limited to 140 characters—to a web interface, where