twitter

Most people have heard that activists in the Iranian Revolution are using Twitter. But how are they using Twitter?

Some (Clay Shirky , Lev Glossman, Mark Ambinder) argue that Twitter is helping organize protest.

TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis methods, Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of his or her tweets compared to a baseline score based on over 1.5 million random tweets.

RID is a text analysis tool of 3,000+ words from 43 categories of cognition and emotion. LIWC is a text analysis tool that calculates the degree to which people use different categories of emotion and self-reference words.

NPR Backstory is an automated Twitter account feed that provides links to old news stories that might be relevant to current events. It uses NPR's API (That's application programming interface (API), a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications - Wikipedia).

A recent Nielsen study covered here as well found that 60% of Twitter users quit after 1 month.

But the study didn't consider any of the third-party applications for desktops or smartphones, through which many users access their Twitter feeds.

Twitter is a great resource in a crisis. Up-to-the-second reporting from citizens adds rich information.

In the last Santa Barbara fire, the Tea Fire, Twitter was being used primarily by early adopters with an interest in reporting the news.

In the recent Jesusita fire, a lot more people have adopted Twitter. While some of this is great: @SBRedCross has a lot of great information, for example. But a lot of the #jesusita posts and many more that result from a search of "santa barbara" are tweets offering prayers or stating how hot it is.

Santa Barbara experienced another fire yesterday.

We covered Twittering and other social media coverage of the Tea Fire in November 2008.

But my has Twitter grown. We don't have data from November's Twitter activity, but my eyeball estimation shows that there are a lot more users.

This is the tracking for the term "Santa Barbara" on Twitter this week with a big jump when the fire started.

Today is our Changemakers Design Charrette.

This is the schedule of events (Pacific Time) and we'd love to have you follow us on Twitter, #changemakers.

Who visits the homepage of a candy?

Skittles made a bold marketing decision and changed the Skittles's homepage, http://www.skittles.com/, to be a view of all Twittering about Skittles.

Will this result in more purchasing and eating of Skittles though?

Twitter continues to grow and grow!

CITS now as a Twitter account as well. Follow UCSBCITS.

A few recently Twitter highlights:

- The Pew Internet and American Life Project released new data this week:

"As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others."