Twitter Adoption and Use in Mass Convergence and Emergency Events

Twitter Adoption and Use in Mass Convergence and Emergency Events Amanda Lee Hughes & Leysia Palen ConnectivIT Lab University of Colorado at Boulder

Overview
Quantitative & Opportunistic study of Twitter in the late summer of 2008
Examine use in four mass convergence events
2 emergency
2 non-emergency
Future research

Twitter
Micro-blogging service
Short messages up to 140 characters
Messages (also known as tweets) can be sent and retrieved through various means
Over 3 million user accounts
Nearly 1 million messages sent per day

Events of Study August and September of 2008
Democratic National Convention (DNC)
August 25-28, 2008
Denver, Colorado
Estimated attendance of 50,000
Republican National Convention (RNC)
September 1-4, 2008
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Estimated attendance of 45,000

Hurricane Gustav
August 25-September 4, 2008
US Landfall near Cocodrie, Louisiana on September 1, 2008
Nearly two million evacuated in the US

Hurricane Ike
September 1-September 14, 2008
US Landfall at Galveston, Texas on September 13, 2008
Mandatory evacuation of 160,000 in the US

Event Timeline

Data Collection

Data Collection
General Twitter Sample - to compare against our event specific data
Taken during our entire data collection timeframe, August 21, 2008 – September 14, 2008.
Of the approximately 27 million tweets sent during this time frame we randomly sampled 1%
Tweets from our other data sets were included

Convention Daily Twitter Activity

Convention Daily Twitter Activity Days of each convention

Hurricane Daily Twitter Activity

Hurricane Daily Twitter Activity US Landfall US Landfall Cuba Landfall

Number of Tweets Per User

Reply Tweet Example
“ @miamiherald what did Gov. Crist say this morning about the Hurricane and Evacs? #Ike”

Reply Tweets

URL Tweet Examples
“ Hurricane Ike hampers relief effort in Haiti - guardian.co.uk http://tinyurl.com/5qwkjo”
“ For latest shelter info: http://www.msema.org/ #gustav”

URL Tweets

Adoption of Twitter
Collected information about all the new users in each data set
Examined how many tweets each new user had sent since the time of the original data collection
Defined “active users” as those who have contributed one or more tweet every week

Adoption of Twitter

Conclusions
Twitter supports information broadcasting and brokerage.
Preliminary evidence that those new Twitter users who join during and in apparent relation to a non-routine event are more likely to become long-term adopters of the technology.

Future Research
This research serves as a baseline.
Twitter activity is changing.
Right now, we are looking at Twitter activity around the recent Red River floods and Oklahoma fires.
Quantitative
Qualitative

Future Research
Look for more to come soon...

Thank You!
This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation:
NSF CAREER Grant IIS-0546315
For more information about our research in Crisis Informatics:
http://disaster.cs.colorado.edu/

Twitter Adoption and Use in Mass Convergence and Emergency Events

by guest8c177f on May 13, 2009

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Twitter Adoption and Use in Mass Convergence and Emergency Events — Presentation Transcript