TwitNine

On May 25, 2008, my wife and I let our two boys stay up late to watch the Phoenix probe land on Mars (televised live on the Science Channel). I remember watching the Space Shuttle Columbia land in the early 1980s I even took a Polaroid photo of the image on our black-and-white television as it came back to earth, to capture the
moment and I hoped that my sons would remember this in the same way. It probably didn’t take, but NASA gave the mission a permanent record of the approach using a Twitter account written in the “voice” of the probe.

The Phoenix tweeted  in the first person throughout the event,  including an exciting flurry of posts as the probe approached the designated landing site (“parachute must open next. my signal still getting to Earth which is AWESOME!”). It gave the project personality and attracted over 36,000 followers. NASA used Twitter to break the news that ice had been discovered on Mars, earning one of three Twittie awards for its con-tribution to the public stream.

Mars Phoenix ended its mission in late 2008, but mission support continues to use the @MarsPhoenix account and leverage the community that formed around the probe. Other NASA Twitter accounts include those for the Mars Rovers, International Space Station, and some shuttle missions.

In February 2009, CNN reported about a Detroit doctor who used Twitter during an operation. Dr. Craig Rogers, the lead surgeon at Henry Ford Hospital, wanted people to know that a tumor can be removed from an organ while leaving the organ intact. As Rogers operated, chief resident Dr. Raj Laungani manned the Twitter timeline. This was the second such in-surgery coverage; Robert Hendrick of  https://www.change healthcare.com had  tweeted his own  surgery  four months  earlier while under  local anesthesia.

When Washington state Republican Representative Jennifer Dunn died in September 2007, people read about it on Twitter before the news hit traditional media sources or even Wikipedia. On January 15, 2009, Janis Krums was on a ferry crossing the Hudson River when he snapped a photo of a downed plane and posted it to Twitter with a short message. The photo was picked up by news services. It is easier to compose a sentence or two and share immediately with others than it is to prepare an in-depth report. For bloggers and journalists alike, the tweet stream can be a great source of story ideas.

CNN’s Rick Sanchez, a Hispanic-American news anchor best known for immersible stunts, solicits tweets for his weekly afternoon news show and features them on the air. Report Twitters, an effort to strengthen the community of professional and amateur reporters, encouraged its members to tweet about the process of getting and filing a story, offering tips and a transparent look behind the bylines.

The pipeline flows the other way, too. News outlets of all sizes, from the BBC and CNN down to local papers and radio stations, make use of Twitter to share breaking news and provide links to their published articles. Bloggers Blog posted information about the 2007–2008 writers’ strike on Twitter, adding to the solidarity base  highlighting
the widespread support for the picket line.

The flip side to news is rumor. As much as we in the Twitosphere like to make a big deal of how quickly we can find out about earthquakes
and plane crashes, the desire to keep the information flowing can lead to mistakes. As with any information you find communicated by media, double-check your sources

November 2008 marked the second anniversary of Robert Scoble’s first tweet in 2006. At a clip of about 17 tweets a day, this A-list blogger has spent the past two years using Twitter to promote his site and share his life with a mass of readers. Amazingly,  Scoble manages to converse with many of his 37,000 followers (most of whom began following him in the past six months). In fact, most of his posts are now directed replies to other users.

Scoble  is one extreme on the user spectrum, but he  isn’t the  leader  in any category. According to TwitDir, as of November 2008 the Twitter account for Station Portal (@InternetRadio) held the record as the biggest producer of content, with over 550,000 tweets and counting. Station Portal monitors about 20,000 Internet radio stations, tracking the number of times each song is played. That account is in the top 1,000 with 1,700 followers, but many Twitter accounts that update über-frequently attract very few followers. In the summer of 2008, the twitterer who attracted the most followers
was Barack Obama, whose throng of 107,000 followers outnumbered those of Digg’s co creator Kevin Rose by 40,000—the equivalent of one Scoble. Obama posted about once every three days throughout the campaign.

A University of Maryland study published  in 2007* captured 1,348,543 tweets from 76,177 members over a two-month period between April and May. The researchers analyzed both the content and the network structure of their sample. One  of   the  outcomes was a graph showing the relationship of tweets to followers, which led them to identify three kinds of Twitter members. Members with high numbers of posts and few followers are considered spammers, and those with many followers and few posts are  information sources (e.g., @BarackObama).  The  authorities sources  such  as @Scobleizer and @InternetRadio—have high numbers in both areas.

The same study also concluded that there are four common user intentions for Twitter members:

Daily chatter

Talk about daily routines and activities Conversations Use of the @ to specifically reference another member Sharing information Inclusion of a pointer referenced in the tweet

Reporting news

Manual and automated reporting of new information, typically through mash ups  with RSS feeds.

This first attempt to officially categorize twitterers through academic analysis offers a good road map for understanding how people make use of their 140 characters to contribute to the information stream. Still, much has changed since the study was done in 2007. The ways people use Twitter today are wide-ranging.