[Air-L] twitter useless to study?

[live]

I don't think it's useless to study in terms of *how* people  
communicate digitally. Lots of linguistic cues and language changes  
have begun in sms and then parlayed over to Twitter, where they're  
being solidified into standard language usage.
Not getting the full subset of data doesn't matter if one is just  
studying the medium itself, and less the message(s).

Cheers,
@SharonG

On Mar 4, 2011, at 3:09 PM, Barry Wellman wrote:

> As an object of study, its hard to do quant analysis of Twitter now  
> because so much of it is spam (unless you're studying spam, that is).
>
> And even qualitative analyses will have to be careful.
>
> Our 2 Twitterology papers got into the sweet spot when Twitter was  
> an appreciable size but before spam dominated (about 80% of my new  
> would-be Followers)
>
> OTOH, I find Twitter useful for research leads -- such as the  
> Atlantic article a tweep broadcast today about how the Internet  
> almost fractured -- or Zeynep et al's (@techsoc) discussion of  
> social media and MENA revolutions.
> Barry Wellman