By Mary O’ Sullivan
Twitter Overview
Twitter, an online microblogging and social networking tool was launched in the United States in 2006. Twitter can be accessed from personal computers, tablets and mobile phones via its website interface, through Short Message Service (SMS) or its mobile-device application. Users can register to post short messages or tweets and can like and retweet the messages of other users. Non-registered users can only view tweets. Users can follow and be followed by other users. A user’s tweets appear in chronological order in the feed of followers. Textual, audio and visual tweets of 140 characters can be posted – however the limit for textual tweets was increased to 240 characters in 2016 for languages other than those which include Chinese characters and derivatives in their writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Users can choose to track specific topics using hashtag phrases – popular topics are referred to as trends. Trends are determined by an algorithm that monitors hot subjects based on who users follow and where they are located. Use of twitter has grown beyond personal communication. It is now used by businesses for promotions and events and in academia and, with other social media. is now considered a vital component of the media strategies of politicians. It is also widely regarded as a high-tech source of news.
Twitter Selected Academic Literature
Many studies have addressed the affordances of the enormous levels of content available on Twitter and the challenges it poses arriving, as it does, unfiltered, full of noise and with great velocity.
Murthy (Murthy, 2018) looked at the ‘allure’ of Twitter and the assumed feeling that masses of users can exert power. He pointed out, however, that the ‘noise’ in the content results in much of it not being read. While he noted that Twitter has become the go-to place for the latest news developments, he discussed what he referred to as ‘update culture’ where a relatively small number of users provide regular updates rather than just initial posts and that it is only a select few users who are influencing public opinion.
Heravi and Harrower (Heravi and Harrower, 2016) investigated the adoption of Twitter by journalists in Ireland in their work, in particular in sourcing and verification processes and at the levels of trust journalists have in it. They found that the adoption of Twitter in newsrooms is in a transitional phase Journalists ‘strongly agree’ that they could not do their work without it and two-thirds of them use it daily as their primary tool for identifying leads. It is used more often for sourcing than newswires, television and radio and less often than print media, press releases and trusted individual contacts. The majority do not trust it for verification purposes, however. The authors also noted, however, that it is younger journalists who displayed greater levels of trust in social media and engaged more frequently with it. One determinant of trust cited was the number and quality of posts found on the account. Heravi and Harrower concluded that as that determinant of trust lies entirely within the fabric of social media, coupled with the fact that younger journalists are embracing it, that social media is gradually becoming more important for journalists and attitudes towards it are changing.
Twitter Timeline – Product and Usage Highlights
| Year | Event |
| 2006 | Twitter is launched. |
| 2007 | The hashtag (#) is introduced on Twitter. |
| 2010 | Advertising in the form of promoted tweets launched. |
| 2012 | Twitter has surpassed 200 million active users. |
| 2013 | A music app called Twitter Music for the iPhone is launched. |
| 2014 | A new suite of anti-harassment tools and faster response times for abuse complaints is announced. |
| 2015 | A facility to allow publishers to target ads to specific audiences is announced. |
| 2015 | Rollout of its new search interface for logged-in web users is completed |
| 2015 | Google adds tweets to its mobile search results. |
| 2015 | Buy buttons is expanded through partnerships with Bigcommerce, Demandware, and Shopify. |
| 2015 | Twitter Moments, a way for people to get a quick overview of important tweets or chains of tweets that occurred recently, is introduced. |
| 2016 | The Twitter feed is changed, making recommended tweets, rather than reverse chronological format, the default option. |
| 2016 | Twitter announces that photos, videos, and the person’s handle will not be counted in the 140 characters, and that a tweet beginning with a handle will be seen by followers. |
| 2016 | Tags to location feeds with Foursquare to enable users to see location of tweets launched |
| 2018 | Word count for tweets is increased from 140 to 280. |
References/Notes
Heravi, B.R., Harrower, N., 2016. Twitter journalism in Ireland: sourcing and trust in the age of social media. Information, communication & society 19, 1194–1213. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1187649
Murthy, D., 2018. Twitter. Polity Press Cambridge, UK.
murthy twitter: social communication at DuckDuckGo [WWW Document], n.d. URL https://duckduckgo.com/?q=murthy+twitter%3A+social+communication&va=b&t=hr&ia=shopping (accessed 12.21.20).
