Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Making the ordinary visible in microblogs

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Microblogging is a “Mobile Web 2.0” service category that enables brief blog-like postings from mobile terminals and PCs to the World Wide Web. To shed light on microblogging as a communication genre, we report on multiple analyses of data from the first 10 months of a service called Jaiku. The main finding is that microblogging centers on selective, I-centered disclosure of current activities and experiences, making daily experiences visible for others. The high frequency of brief and mundane status updates, like “working,” may be a second-order effect resulting from posting becoming a routine executed to keep the audience interested. The results highlight the importance of reciprocal activity and feedback in users’ motivation to invest in this activity.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Note that toward 2010 Twitter has vastly eclipsed Jaiku in the number of users. Compete.com reported 55 million visits monthly in January 2009 for Twitter; see http://blog.compete.com/2009/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network/.

  2. After 2007, Google open-sourced Jaiku in January 2009 and then re-launched it on its App Engine platform.

References

  1. Altman I, Taylor DA (1973) Social penetration: the development of interpersonal relationships. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York

    Google Scholar 

  2. Barkhuus L, Brown B, Bell M, Hall M, Sherwood S, Chalmers M (2008) From awareness to repartee: Sharing location within social groups. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM Press, New York, pp 497–506

  3. Batagelj V, Pajek MA (2003) Analysis and visualization of large networks. In: Jünger M, Mutzel P (eds) Graph drawing software. Springer, Berlin, pp 77–103

    Google Scholar 

  4. Collins NL, Miller LC (1994) Self-disclosure and liking: a meta-analytic review. Psychol Bull 116(3):457–475

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Engeström J (2008) Blind men’s baseball—the social importance of peripheral vision. A blog entry at http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2006/07/blind_mens_base.html. Accessed 15 Apr 2008

  6. Goffman E (1959) The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday, New York

    Google Scholar 

  7. Grinter RE, Eldridge MA (2001) y do tngrs luv 2 txt msg? In: Proceedings of the ECSCW’01. Kluwer, Norwell, MA, pp 219–238

  8. Herring SC, Kouper I, Paolillo JC, Scheidt LA, Tyworth M, Welsch P, Wright E, Yu N (2005) Conversations in the blogosphere: an analysis “from the bottom up.” In: Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii international conference on system sciences (HICSS ‘05). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, pp 107–118

  9. Herring SC, Sheidt LA, Bonus S, Wright E (2004) Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of weblogs. In: Proceedings of the 37th annual Hawaii international conference on system sciences (HICSS ‘04). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, pp 101–111

  10. Java A, Song X, Finin T, Tseng B (2007) Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In: Proceedings of the joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD workshop 2007. University of Maryland, Baltimore County

  11. Kurvinen E (2007) Prototyping social action. Doctoral dissertation, A75. University of Art and Design Helsinki, Helsinki

  12. Lavallee A (2008) Friends swap twitters, and frustration. Wall Street J. http://online.wsj.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2007

  13. Mishne G, Glance N (2006) Leave a reply: an analysis of weblog comments. In: Proceedings of the 3rd annual workshop on the weblogging ecosystem: aggregation, analysis and dynamics. WWW06, Edinburgh

  14. Nardi BA, Schiano DJ, Gumbrecht M (2004) Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary? In: Proceedings of the ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work. ACM Press, New York, pp 222–231

  15. Okabe D, Ito M (2003) Camera phones changing the definition of picture-worthy. Japan Media Rev. http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1062208524.php

  16. Oulasvirta A, Petit R, Raento M, Tiitta S (2007) Interpreting and acting on mobile awareness cues. Human Comput Interact 22(1–2):97–135

    Google Scholar 

  17. Popping R (2000) Computer-assisted text analysis. SAGE, New York

    Google Scholar 

  18. Qian H, Scott CR (2007) Anonymity and self-disclosure on weblogs. J Comput Mediat Commun 12(4):1428–1451

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Raento M, Oulasvirta A, Petit R, Toivonen H (2005) ContextPhone: a prototyping platform for context-aware mobile applications. IEEE Pervasive Comput 4(2):51–59

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Rubin Z (1975) Disclosing oneself to a stranger: reciprocity and its limits. J Exp Soc Psychol 11(3):233–260

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Sacks H, Schegloff EA, Jefferson G (1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking in conversation. Language 50(4):696–735

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Sacks H (1995) In: Jefferson G (ed) Lectures on conversation, vol II. Blackwell, Oxford

  23. Schmidt J (2007) Blogging practices: an analytical framework. J Comput Mediat Commun 12(4):1409–1427

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Silfverberg M, MacKenzie IS, Korhonen P (2000) Predicting text entry speed on mobile phones. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM Press, New York, pp 9–16

  25. Strauss AL, Corbin JM (1998) Basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. Sage, New York

    Google Scholar 

  26. Thelwall M (2006) Bloggers during the London attacks: top information sources and topics. In: Proceedings of the blog workshop at WWW2006

  27. Trammell KD, Keshelashvili A (2005) Examining new influences: a self-presentation study of A-list blogs. J Mass Commun Q 82(4):968–982

    Google Scholar 

  28. Trammell KD, Tarkowski A, Hofmokl J, Sapp AM (2006) Rzeczpospolita blog (Republic of Blog): examining Polish bloggers through content analysis. J Comput Mediat Commun 11(3):702–722

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Van House N (2004) Weblogs: credibility and collaboration in an online world. In: Proceedings of the workshop on computer supported cooperative work. CHI, Vienna

  30. Wikipedia article on Micro-blogging (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogging. Accessed 30 Mar 2008

Download references

Acknowledgments

The coding manual is available on the second author’s Web site: http://www.helsinki.fi/~eplehton/jaiku/JaikuCodingManual.pdf. This work has been supported by the Fulbright Technology Industries of Finland scholarship program, the Academy of Finland project ContextCues, and the EU FP6 project PASION. We thank danah boyd, Miikka Miettinen, Louise Barkhuus, and Akshay Java for commenting on the early versions of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

    Antti Oulasvirta

  2. Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Helsinki University of Technology TKK, Helsinki, Finland

    Antti Oulasvirta & Esko Lehtonen

  3. Elisa Corporation, Helsinki, Finland

    Esko Kurvinen

  4. Google UK Ltd, London, UK

    Mika Raento

Authors
  1. Antti Oulasvirta
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Esko Lehtonen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Esko Kurvinen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Mika Raento
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Antti Oulasvirta.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Oulasvirta, A., Lehtonen, E., Kurvinen, E. et al. Making the ordinary visible in microblogs. Pers Ubiquit Comput 14, 237–249 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0259-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0259-y

Keywords

Search

Navigation