This paper looks at Twitter, the micro-blogging, social networking service, to see what we can glean from the collective voices it aggregates. Twitter has becomes a household name. It has grown rapidly over the last few years, in its aims, the service it offers, and in its public and media profile1. Much has been written about Twitter and it's users; some negative, some positive. So, the central question of this paper is; what can we learn from Twitter and it's micro-blogging system?

Prior to focusing on the central question it is worth defining Twitter and the related terms that are used. Twitter is has its headquarters in San Francisco, USA. It was founded in 2006 and now has around 70 employees. The original incarnation of Twitter was as a podcasting company, however, in 2005 it was feeling the pressure of competition, and the management felt the need to reinvent themselves. They set about by holding a series of brain-storming sessions. Out of those brain-storming sessions 'Odeo Inc.' became 'Twitter', and podcasting gave way to micro-blogging.2

Central to their shift was that they now saw themselves as existing at the cross-over point between the web and mobile, illustrated by the following; there is a 140 character limit, the site is simple to use and there is a low threshold to joining. Their service; the idea of a simple post outwards to the Internet/mobile devices which kept fellow users updated about status/thoughts/ideas etc. became known as micro-blogging.

The social-network component, while not a new idea, is important to the process. It comes from the ability of users to 'follow' each other, in much the same way as one adds friends on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace. However, the key difference between Twitter and Facebook (and a very important point, as we will see later) is that what users communicate in Twitter (known

as atweet, as in 'what users tweet...') is open to the public by default, whereas in Facebook these comments are only open to that user's friends.3 Also of note is the idea of the hash-tag – this is where users add the hash '#' symbol to the start of a word, e.g. #bristol,4 which groups tweets by that subject. There is no creation process to a hash-tag, users just add the character as and when they see fit, with repeated usage of terms and ideas actually building a shared common conception.

Recently, Twitter had the misfortune to have many of it's internal documents and emails leaked onto the internet. What

documents showed is how Twitter views itself, both now and in the future. A revealing slide from a February 2009 strategy meeting showed how the

management believe that once Twitter hits the 1bil l ion users point they will have captured the 'pulse of the planet'.5 Whilst this is a construct, and no guarantee of how others may see Twitter, it does raise the first question about what Twitter and it's users can tell us. 'Pulse' implies a simple, singular point of measurement that offers a view into a larger and more complex system, much as the pulse of a person can tell you information regarding their health etc. How accurate a 'pulse' is Twitter?

The number of users is a key point, for without a significant base of users the concept of the 'pulse' falls apart. Twitter's growth has been staggering; until the end of 2008 the site had grown 752% to around 4.5 million users.6

By the end of 2009 this number was projected to be 18 million users and is forecast to be around 26 million users by the end of 2010.7

4http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/49309
5http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet/
6http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/twitter-growth-2008/
7http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007271

Facebook, which has around 250 million users worldwide:8 though Twitter is still growing fast9 What is also interesting is the percentage of overall Internet users that these figures represent.

This means that the 'pulse' is becoming a sizeable percentage of the overall user-base, does this mean that is Twitter is starting to genuinely reflect what users are thinking and doing?

So, what does all this traffic translate into in terms of data volume? Recently, FluffyLogic have developed a system that taps into the raw Twitter feed to gather data about areas of interest. Our first application of this system was to gather and rank data about what iPhone games users thought were worthy of attention, the result was TopTweetGames.11 During our development of the TopTweets system, however, we noticed some interesting information about the amount of raw data this pulse generates12:

As can be seen from these figures, only 3 of the 18,000 tweets had information that we deemed important enough to score. This is a ratio of 6000:1. Clearly, there is a huge amount of information, but it is making sense of all this data and distilling into a form that

12 The data generated is from January 2009. These figures represent a snap-shot of Twitter in action; the number varies from time of day and day of the week and will probably have increased by the time you read this due to Twitter's ongoing growth rate!