Twitter’s Developement Of Networks Beyond the Social Stratosphere
Twitter has almost unanimously become an accepted part of each college student’s life. However, in comparison to any other social media outlet, Twitter is extremely unique. Twitter’s success has been the result of the ability for the site to create rapid communication between and amongst users. Twitter acheives this rapid communication by limiting its total characters per post to 140 and by allowing every tweet to be available to the general public. It is obvious that through the addition of followers and the ability to direct a tweet, Twitter creates its own network. This is comparable to the network found on Facebook or any other large scale social media website. However, Twitter’s power to connect different people extends much further than its basic network.
Take for example, Twitter’s “break through moment” at the South by Southwest festival in 2007. The Twitter team hooked up a few monitors at the festival that had a live stream of tweets with the hashtag – #SXSW. This gave the ability for festival goers to look at the screens and see the “trending topic” or a list of people’s favorite things to do at the festival. Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter compared the movement of the crowd to a flock of birds, flying in unison. This is the first time Twitter departed from the typical network structure, which only allows for communication between nodes that have edges connection them. Twitter’s public forum allowed for individuals at the festival to interact and gain knowledge without relying upon edges in the network.
This became even more important, when Twitter began being used for a mode of communication between “like-minded” individuals. The most meaningful example of this is the so called “Twiter Revolutions”. After the presidential elections in Iran during 2009, a new “trending topic” on twitter was discovered – #iranelections. This became a forum for protest against the recently elected president, whom many believed rigged the election. The turmoil that followed the election was captured by Twitter. It also gave a forum for protestors to connect and discuss the turbulent aftermath of the election. In some ways, Twitter even served as a warning system with tweets such as: “Woman says ppl knocking on her door 2 AM saying they were intelligence agents, took her daughter”. As one reporter states, Twitter has given rebels the ability to spread the word out about their revolution and a worldwide audience to aid their cause. These tweets gave knowledge to anyone who could read them, regardless of the connection between the writer and reader. It is this important facet of Twitter that makes it so superior to other social networks in its ability to promote communication. The global awareness that Twitter has brought to users is just one way Twitter has changed our world.
Twitter allows for more robust distribution of knowledge across its users. The people who use Twitter are at an advantage because they have access to information that a typical network would not allow them to have. The importance of edges has been diminished in this case, because the ability to access information has become independent of these edges. If we were to compare this to the example of where people find job offers from class, Twitter extends the “outside information” that an individual is exposed to. Twitter’s ability to give outside information to its users, makes it less likely that these users will need to rely on local bridges to find this kind of outside information. In this way, Twitter trumps other social media sites that only allow for information to flow within the network.
~~ Dobes
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html#ixzz28D6I2ein
http://fora.tv/2010/07/07/Short_Messages_Big_Impact_Twitter_Founders_Biz_and_Ev
http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/twitter/index.html