I did a little analysis of our survey participants. The following picture shows the social network between the people who answered our questions. Red nodes are users who retweeted my announcement. The big node in the middle is me (I did not take part in the survey but added me for the network analysis). There is a little bit wrong influence in this analysis because I added some of the participants to my network after the survey because their updates were protected and we needed access or just because they were interesting. You can clearly see that all but two nodes are connected to each other. The survey was promoted 99% via Twitter so this is a logical consequence. The two lonely nodes may come from this posting on the Microblogging Conference blog.

I used a great piece of software called Network Workbench (nwb) for the visualisation. The connection data was retrieved via the Twitter API and imported into nwb as CSV file (one row of the file looks like “usera, userb, true” that means that “usera” is following “userb”).

Here are some more:

A few weeks ago I run a survey in and about Twitter (together with Stuart). Now it is time to present a summary of the results. We are going to contribute the results in detail combined with a PLS analysis to one of the major IS conferences in 2009. We want to thank all our participants!

The survey lasted 13 days and had nearly 140 participants. After clearing up the data (i.e. spelling errors in the Twitter user names) we had 131 data sets. The following figure shows the origins of the participants (information from the QuestionPro logs, data visualization using Swivel):

The majority of participants has a very good opinion on Twitter (1..”Strongly Disagree” till 7..”Strongly Agree”):

The answers to all the other questions concerning confirmation, perceived usefullness and satisfaction were very similar to the figure above. Questions about the intention to use Twitter in future showed a slightly shift. This might be a result of downtime and reliability issues (i.e. archive accessibility) as well as of powerfull competitors (not only other microblogging tools but status updates in Facebook as well as activity streams like Friendfeed).

The most interesting results were indeed the answers to the critical mass questions. There is no clear average opionion as the participants split into two halfs: one group says they have many friends on Twitter while the other group says they have not. There is a clear correlation between a person’s network size (friends as well as followers) and her/his attitude to the critical mass questions. You can see the result for “Many people I communicate with use Twitter” here:

The implication of this finding is that although people say there are not many people on Twitter they communicate with it still can be usefull and they want continue using it. This means that there must be other valueable usages beside communication: networking or just reading updates of others (maybe strangers).

It will be announced here once the full survey paper is available. I look forward hearing your comments and thoughts.

In a time when it seems to be old-fashioned to run a blog I proudly present mine: thingthatthinks.com. In fact a blog would have been useful during my thesis work over the last months but better late than never. I am going to write from time to time about my research on topics like web 2.0, enterprise social software and business intelligence. Read more about me and the blog name or my research interests.

I thought a lot about what language I should write in. My native language is German and my English is far from perfect. But finally I decided to write in English. The reason is: the community out there (you!) is much greater. So I apologise for every language issue and encourage you to correct me if necessary. By the way: this is my first major Wordpress project. So if you find a technology issue please contact me.

The first “real” posting is scheduled for sunday. It will present the results of the Twitter survey we run a few weeks before. So just use the RSS feed to stay connected.