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Link to original content: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0259-y
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Making the ordinary visible in microblogs

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
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  2. Esko Lehtonen
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  3. Esko Kurvinen
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  4. Mika Raento
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Correspondence to Antti Oulasvirta.

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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

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