Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter

A corpus of naturally-occurring public Twitter messages reveals a surprising degree of conversationality, facilitated especially by the use of @ as a marker of addressivity, and shed light on the limitations of Twitter's current design for collaborative use.

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 an attempt 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 Twitter messages (tweets), focusing on the functions and uses of the @ sign and the coherence of exchanges. The findings reveal a surprising degree of conversationality, facilitated especially by the use of @ as a marker of addressivity, and shed light on the limitations of Twitter's current design for collaborative use.