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Twitter Community of Practice

January 10th, 2008 by chris 4 Comments Tags:

A paper presented here today analyzing a mobile social network application (kind like Twitter with groups, but only accessible from mobile devices) using “information ground” theory has me thinking about Twitter and the immensely important community of practice that it, like blogging, has allowed me to participate in I’m very curious if Twitter, an analagous system in multiple ways, will demonstrate the same characteristics regarding directed, non-directed, social revelation, witty banter, etc.

It’s still vague, but I have some ideas. One part would involve content coding… what “kinds” of Twitter posts are there that we can identify just by looking at them. A few off the top of my head (and a single Twit could invoke multiple categories… and some of these categories could likely be broken down further):

  • link sharing
  • social sharing (the classic twit)
  • direct questions
  • direct answers
  • banter (generalized)
  • banter (directed to in-group)
  • Share/Bookmark

4 Responses to “Twitter Community of Practice”

  1. Nancy White Says:
    January 10th, 2008 at 3:16 pm

    Here’s another… learning by watching others (Legitimate Peripheral Participation)

    Sweet post. Thanks.

  2. Alan Levine Says:
    January 10th, 2008 at 3:25 pm

    Uh oh a Twitter Taxonomy!

    Just kidding. It is helpful to think about the range of communication modes. A few more:

    * Call and Response- someone tweets, “Hey I am talking to a group of ________ please tweet in the most important thing you have done in _____________” or …. “Join is in 10 minutes for the live ustream.tv for our conversation with _______ about ________”

    * Supportive feedback “great blog post, Chris! Keep up the good fight”

    * Retweeting. I;ve seen this where I put out a question or request, and someone else, who has a different set of followers will retweet by request so it reaches farther

  3. chris Says:
    January 10th, 2008 at 3:48 pm

    Excellent… a lot of your blogging and conference notes were coming to mind when I was talking with the author of the paper after the session…

  4. chris Says:
    January 10th, 2008 at 3:52 pm

    I’ll try not to go too crazy with it. The categories in the paper I was referring to were pretty broad. In order of occurrence (you can tell this is a directed social app)

    Coordinating get togethers
    Chit-chat
    information exchange
    answering questions
    checking-in/hellos
    witty banter

    For my purposes looking at a community of practice, I figure expanding the information exchange area seems appropriate. Assuming that it is, as I suspect, a major component.