Finally, Some Real Twitter Research

Last week, the 140 Characters Conference (#140conf) was the epitome of the social media echoplex. We were underground, talking about ourselves and the impact that we one day might have on the world. Very often inside the echoplex you’ll hear people talking about doing “Twitter research”. Usually that research entails looking at their feed of their friends or an RSS search for a hashtag.

Today, the Web Ecology Project has blown every single one of those “research” reports out of the water. “The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days” is a scientific look at two million plus messages produced by Twitter users.

One thing that would have been interesting would be to see messages per location and how that information spread, but the users of Twitter were poisoning that well of information by changing their locations to and/or from Iran in a futile attempt to stop the Iranian government from finding them. All this did was potentially spread misinformation about what was actually going on.

Regardless, click the image to read hard facts about the Iranian election and Twitter.