• Who Gives A Tweet: MIT Researchers Build A "Hot Or Not" For Twitter

    Thursday, December 30th, 2010

    Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

    Because everything eventually becomes an academic field (I’m still waiting for “Internet” to become a major), researchers from MIT, University of Southampton and Georgia Institute of Technology have teamed up to build Who Gives A Tweet, a Twitter app that allows users to anonymously rate their friends’ and strangers’ tweets in order gain more insight into status update perception. Kind of like Hot Or Not, but for tweets.

    While plenty of apps like Twitalyzer and Twitter Grader try to measure your social media engagement whatever that means, the Who Gives A Tweet study attempts to parse what is valuable and not so valuable about microblogging content. Says Michael Bernstein, PhD student at MIT, “Analysing the negatively rated tweets, and the consensus that forms around them, will help us understand the emerging approved or accepted norms in these new forms of online communication.”

    Aside from serving up feedback from your friends, the app also gives you tweet feedback from strangers via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Thus far I have been rated by two people on my “Caveat: I have absolutely no interest in anything that combines New Year’s resolutions and social media” tweet from yesterday. While one person found it “Sort of funny” another said “This person has no interest in New year’s resolutions and social media, and I have no interest in this tweet.” Ouch.

    Says Twitter app store founder Laura Fitton, “It gets right to everybody’s core uncertainties about Twitter, ‘Am I doing it right?’ ‘Am I boring?’

    You can find Who Gives A Tweet in the Twitter app store here.

    Company: Twitter
    Website: twitter.com
    Launch Date: March 21, 2006
    Funding: $1.16B

    Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post updates 140 characters long. Twitter “is a real-time information network that connects [users] to the latest stories, ideas, opinions, and news.” The service can be accessed through a variety of methods, including Twitter’s website; text messaging; instant messaging; and third-party desktop, mobile, and web applications. Twitter is currently available in...

    Learn more

    Sponsored Ads

    blog comments powered by Disqus

    Sponsored Ads

    Sponsored Ads

    Upcoming Events

    E3 2012

    Los Angeles, CA

    Disrupt SF 2012

    San Francisco, CA