What Film To Watch Tonight

So just in case you have haven't heard of it, Twitter is a recent addition to the Social Network spectrum which involves posting (or tweeting) small messages to a group of self proclaimed followers.

Twitter exploded specifically through the Arab uprisings and has become a de facto real time News source for many people. The thing that most interests me about this is that people are starting to ask questions of the Twitter-sphere like 'what film to watch #decisions' being a common one.

So what are people's real expectations of asking these questions?

Unlike Yahoo Answers Twitter is not a fan of people abusing the ability to direct posts to people who aren't followers however I am sure that Twitter users are not relying on their own followers for advice. I base this on the fact that during my research I have found that few people answer tweeted questions. Especially if the user has few followers and little notoriety in the Twitter field.

So are uses expecting random people to respond?

I did a test, I focused my research on the Twitter question posted above. I set up a small experiment where I build an automated Twitter personality who would search recent tweets for these questions 'what film to watch' and post back responses. The responses varied from simple film suggestions:

'What about The Godfather?'

To more complex responses such as suggesting multiple films:

'What about The Godfather or Scarface?'

And then on to more useful responses including links to popular sources of trailers and/or reviews to allow the user to click through to the relevant resource and find out more.

So what were the findings?

Well people's expectations fell into a few categories.

The first were tried and tested users of Twitter who exhibited large tweet counts, large following and follower counts who would ignore this message or worse report it as spam. These users were net contributors to Twitter. They would use Twitter as a social platform to advertise themselves and their own thoughts.

The second were more moderate users of Twitter who exhibited small tweet counts and small follower counts but perhaps large following counts. These users would be grateful for the answer since they shows signs of being a net beneficiary from Twitter. They would use Twitter as an information source, be likely to subscribe to News websites and other information sources. These users were more likely to retweet the response or even respond back.

So in conclusion I found that Twitter is full of contributors and beneficiaries. Depending on the context people's attitudes to anonymous responses would differ. Is this something Twitter should considering in their Social Network model? What do you think? Providing useful articles, reviews and writings on movies and films online.