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.
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?
Posted by: k | June 04, 2007 at 12:11 AM
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".
Posted by: rodcorp | June 04, 2007 at 10:06 PM