Twitter is all about Maslovian love/belonging (sleep, commuting, lunch, friends)

I'd been grumpily trying to prove that Twitter was only about sleep, lunch and commuting, though at some point I'd left it and moved on to something else, possibly because I needed a kip, a snack or to get back to work. Today, Matt and Foe's pictures of Tweetvolume reminded me of it, and I thought about Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, which contends that "as humans meet basic needs, they seek to satisfy successively higher needs that occupy a set hierarchy".

At the lowest, physiological level, lunch and sleep are big at the time of writing (and I assume that food terms are much bigger in aggregate). At the safety level, home is very popular. At the love/belonging level, friends is monstrous (and interestingly, 5x the size of friend. And I stuck going in there because it seemed to a lower level thing than esteem...) At the esteem level, work is big. At the final self-actualisation level, goodness is all.

Thus we can confidently conclude that Twitter is about social snacking with friends after your taxing commute from work and before having a nice sleep at home. Unsurprisingly for a techno-social tool, its sweet spot is the love/belonging level.

You may be able to come up with better search terms, or frankly disprove this. But it's probably not worth it, because that experiment was un-scientific on so many levels: I did it in five minutes, my terms don't fit Maslow's hierarchy levels well (and the hierarchy itself is questioned by other scholars), and I made sure I drew conclusions to support my original hypothesis. So there.

All Twitter tools and mashups in one place suggests a couple of sites (like TwitterBuzz or http://twitter.isite.net.au) that are working out the most cited terms or links, but I can't get them to work. Perhaps Tweetvolume or Twitter themselves could simply provide a list of the most Twittered terms.

Comments

[k]

Friend vs. Friends might be something to do with the fact that in a group of friends, you're likely to have 'lacunae' - moments when the flow of conversation ebbs away from you, so you can look down and away to your mobile. If you were in a one to one 'friend' situation, it would be ruder to suddenly engage with your phone, and you're less likely to have pauses in the conversation.

Maybe?

[rodcorp]

I think you're right. But also: from a content perspective, there's going to be a lot of "going to have a drink with friends".