Twitter Retweet

My experience with Twitter throughout this assignment has been predictable. I chose this web community because like almost every other young adult I have extensive experience with Facebook and it seems Twitter is constantly paired with the more popular web community. Twitter to me is most likely going to remain in the long shadow cast by Facebook for the foreseeable future. Talk show hosts such as Jimmy Fallon or TV shows like The Voice, Pretty Little Liars and Survivor continuously promote people to use Twitter. But is it really working? How can it been when my experience shows that none of my 400+ Facebook friends openly says they have a Twitter account that I could follow? 

While investigating Twitter I have found that while it is promoted and talked about, everything is about whom you know and where you live. When snooping around Twitter’s promo page I found that Twitter use is much more common on the East coast. That could explain the lack of average Vancouver, Washington Facebook users having (or using) a Twitter account. Along with that, if Twitter is only promoted on TV stations like CNN, Bet and MTV then a certain clientele would be expected, people who are current and up-to-date on news and politics and people who enjoy reality TV and popular hip-hop/rap artists.

This snapshot shows the increase in tweets per minute after Twitter was promoted on the show Pretty Little Liars. The jump in activity is dramatically more apparent on the East coast than on the West coast.

 

This snapshot shows the increase in number tweets per minute for Piers Morgan after have the Kardashians on CNN, again the change in activity is greater in the East than the West.

I have learned that web communities in general are subjective to each person. It doesn’t matter what social networking site you use or don’t use you will find people who hate and love that site. The reality of this became apparent with my own use. I hated using Twitter, it is still confusing to me and seems like a waste of my time, but there are people out there who use it religiously and therefore must love Twitter.

One thing I learned about technology is that you must always check out the privacy policy. Twitter is a popular site and I assumed that meant their privacy policy was going to up to par with the criteria given in our book. I was surprised to find that not to be true. While most of the points were somewhat followed, as in the item was glossed over but not specifically addressed, some points where severely lacking. While the United States has not adopted the OCED principles I still expected a certain level of agreement since we have the FTC Fair Information Practice but it didn’t stack up to the OCED guidelines. Twitter's Privacy Policy: https://twitter.com/privacy

Overall this assignment was informative but Twitter has not convinced me to keep on tweeting.