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.

Crunchbase

• TWITTER

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 their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

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