Conversational tagging in twitter

TLDR

Twitter users began adding tags to posts around February 2008, and unlike other Web 2.0 platforms, these tags are rarely used for indexing but serve other purposes. The study compares Twitter tagging to Delicious to demonstrate its conversational nature, and describes the micro‑meme phenomenon to highlight its significance for real‑time search. The authors employ a mixed statistical and interpretive methodology to analyze Twitter tagging. Twitter tagging primarily filters and directs content into specific streams, exemplified by transient micro‑memes that arise, spread briefly, and then fade.

Abstract

Users on Twitter, a microblogging service, started the phenomenon of adding tags to their messages sometime around February 2008. These tags are distinct from those in other Web 2.0 systems because users are less likely to index messages for later retrieval. We compare tagging patterns in Twitter with those in Delicious to show that tagging behavior in Twitter is different because of its conversational, rather than organizational nature. We use a mixed method of statistical analysis and an interpretive approach to study the phenomenon. We find that tagging in Twitter is more about filtering and directing content so that it appears in certain streams. The most illustrative example of how tagging in Twitter differs is the phenomenon of the Twitter micro-meme: emergent topics for which a tag is created, used widely for a few days, then disappears. We describe the micro-meme phenomenon and discuss the importance of this new tagging practice for the larger real-time search context.