Twitter is a popular social networking service which allows
anyone to create an account and “tweet”, or post, a message in 140 characters
or less. The beauty here is that you can “follow” other people which brings you
their latest messages and if you pair that with a smartphone supporting push
notifications, you get them immediately as they are posted. Of course there are
thousands of posts where people basically describe everything they do on an
hourly basis, even sometimes with pictures, which does not really have a useful
purpose for most people except for those who follow them. Fortunately, Twitter
does make it easy to quickly disseminate information by the following and
“retweeting” functions.
Twitter
is great for various blogs and news organizations to quickly post news to all
their followers. Since the message character limit is 140 characters, these
users are also forced to shorten their messages to only contain headlines that quickly
get to the point they are trying to make. In my opinion, short and concise
messages make it easier to skim through a whole list of them since they don’t
contain any fillers, which is helpful when following multiple users.
Surprisingly, the origin of this limit had nothing to do with being concise. It
was actually done for a technical reason so that people could receive tweets
via SMS on their phones which itself was limited to 160 characters. Regardless,
Twitter helps bring headline news to the masses.
On the
other side of things, Twitter itself can act as an up-to-the-minute news
network. Since people can tweet anything and everything, there is a lot of data
there that can be mined. The same can be said about other social networking
services like Facebook and Instagram where it’s easy to find out the latest
trends in news, fashion, or popular videos on YouTube if you know where to
look. It turns out that there is a software tool available called Dataminr,
which does exactly that by analyzing billions of Twitter postings for patterns.
These patterns can indicate breaking news or emerging trends. As the referenced
NYTimes article mentions, CNN followed up on a tweet from a teenager that
Justin Bieber was arrested by calling the local police precinct which asked
them how they could have possibly known about this incident. Now everyone’s
voice can heard, that is only if they have some kind of presence on Twitter.
Aside from letting news organizations get the latest news stories faster, this
kind of data mining can also help in emergencies where people posting pictures
and their location data can help emergency responders quickly figure out where
and what the emergency is.
Twitter
and the latest news and trends go hand in hand. It only takes some computer analysis
to figure out what topics are currently trending which serves as a wealth of
information for many news organizations as each of them wants to be the first
to report about it. With the short character limit, users can create their own “news
feeds” which will bring them headline news as soon as they are posted. In this
generation, I believe that people are more akin to sharing more and more
details of their lives on such social networks as Twitter and this fact is what
gives data mining its purpose. Now that software like Dataminr are coming to
fruition, we will be able to quickly filter out of the billions of tweets for
popular and emerging topics.
References:
No comments:
Post a Comment