Twitter

In eerste instantie aan mijn aandacht ontsnapt, maar wel degelijk van belang in de discussie over het nut van het fenomeen Twitter, is het artikel Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope van Huberman, Romero en Wu in het januari nummer van First Monday.

"Many people, including scholars, advertisers and political activists, see online social networks as an opportunity to study the propagation of ideas, the formation of social bonds and viral marketing, among others. This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. As we showed in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend".