1. Twitter Over Time: Approaches to the
dynamics of change in social media
Jean Burgess
Queensland University of
Technology
@jeanburgess
Nancy Baym
Microsoft Research
@nancybaym
Christina VanMeter https://www.flickr.com/photos/cmphotography2010/

2. 16 July 2006 http://paulstamatiou.com/odeo-launches-twttr-hellodeo/

4. http://gizmodo.com/5925156/the-worst-tweets-from-the-first-year-of-twitter

5. http://gizmodo.com/5925156/the-worst-tweets-from-the-first-year-of-twitter

7. Available scholarship
• Murthy, D. (2013). Twitter: Social communication in the
Twitter age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Rogers, R. (2014). Debanalizing Twitter: The Transformation of
an Object of Study. In Weller, K. et al (Eds.) Twitter and Society
(pp. ix-xxvi). New York: Peter Lang.
• van Dijck, J. (2013). Culture of connectivity: A critical history of
social media (Kindle Edition). New York: Oxford University
Press.
• Halavais, A. (2014). Structure of Twitter: Social and Technical.
In Weller, K. et al (Eds.) Twitter and Society (pp. 29-41) New
York: Peter Lang.
• Kooti, F., Yang, H., Cha, M., Gummadi, K., & Mason, W. (2012).
The emergence of conventions in online social networks.
In International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social
Media.

8. The Twitter Over Time study
• Materials collected
– Media coverage
– Vlog accounts on YouTube
– Blog posts
– Personal Archives
– Interviews
– Plus material related to Twitter platform changes

15. @reply
RT
#hashtag

16. @reply
• Origins
– From launch @ location/activity (Dodgeball convention)
– Late 2006 @ user and @user ‘consciously’ adopted by lead
users
• Adoption
– Widespread adoption
– Early 2007 official support (by hyperlinking)
• Retention and controversy
– May 2007 Replies page introduced to collect replies and
mentions
– @replying always controversial (‘Twitter isn’t a chat room’)
– 2008-2009: visibility of @replies to non-followers

17. “I only see them if I know the people and I think
it’s kind of interesting looking at other people’s
conversations, I guess.”
@reply

18. @reply
“2008 I did my first @ mention and it was in a
reply. And for the most part almost all of my @
mentions are almost always replies to somebody
else. I never start a conversation with @”

19. RT
• Origins
– Competing alternatives - via, HT, RT, Retweet,
Retweeting
• Adoption
– Early 2009 (?) – RT adopted as ‘official’ citation
• Retention and controversy
– 2009 ‘Button’ retweets

23. RT
• “even people that I didn’t meet at the
conference, I would just throw them in on that
list if it seemed like-- if they were getting
retweeted a bunch by people in my feed, saying
things that I thought were cool, I’d just add them
into that. So, that became my reading list. It just
slowly was like accumulating more and more
people. And some people on it kind of became
people that were just taking up a lot of space and
not saying a lot of useful stuff.”

24. RT
“I was tweeting about how I didn't want that to be
the new thing. I didn't like that on my feed there
was people I didn't know, like the pictures popping
up, like "Who is that? Why are they in my feed?"
And then I was thinking-- I don't know. I just really
was against it, and then I slowly, slowly started-- it
was just so easy, just don't have enough time to
rewrite everything and copy-paste it. So I think here
is where I actually started doing it, and recently
sometimes a lot of my activity is just rote retweets.
So I think by May it looks like I was comfortable
using it.”

25. RT
• ‘’It is kind of like an etiquette thing, and, yeah,
I sometimes wonder when I tweet and it'll be
either a retweet and I'll add something ahead
of it or I'll modify it so I can say something--
sometimes I really have something to say, and
other times it's just like "Ha. This is funny,"
and I'm like "Is that okay? I don't know if that's
okay. Am I cheating? Am I stealing your social
whatever?"

26. #hashtag
• Origins
– mid-2007 – Chris Messina proposes ‘channel tags’ using the
pound symbol (#)
– Groups/vs ‘eavesdropping’
• Adoption
– Oct 2007 - Messina campaigns for #sandiegofire hashtag, Wired
picks up the story
– Third-party tools for ‘defining’, tracking
– 2008 platform, client support
• Retention and controversy
– Hashtags now part of the grammar of the web
– 2013 backlash from web dev community
– 2014 rumours that Twitter will phase out @reply and #hashtag

27. #hashtag
“I went to go be co-present with [the
protesters], and then I came back and I stayed
not physically co-present but very engaged on
the hashtag.”

28. #hashtag
“They have a hashtag, they have a conference, and
[they] share their content a lot on Twitter, and they
meet once a year at this conference that I went to.
So when I went to this conference, I used Twitter
strategically to cement connections with people
that I'd met. Because the one thing I tended to lack
on Twitter is friends, and I thought if I meet people,
in addition to being-- I could stay up to date with
what they're doing professionally and things like
that. Also it would be sort of like trading business
cards.”

29. #hashtag
“live-tweeting can be a really great access tool
for people who can’t travel to every conference
that they would want to go to. But I also think
there’s some etiquette that can probably use
some agreeing. Like, if we could all agree on sort
of the rules <laughs> of live-tweeting, I think
that would probably help.”

30. A conclusion, brief yet inspiring,
placed at the end
• Web history is important
• Need to document platforms as they are and
as they change
• Platforms ever-shifting contested terrains
• Usefulness of combining multiple kinds of
sources
• Need to connect materiality of platform with
user experiences and perspectives