Out of the box

The microblogging service Twitter is in the process of being appropriated for conversational interaction and is starting to be used for collaboration, as well. In order to determine how well Twitter supports user-to-user exchanges, what people are using Twitter for, and what usage or design modifications would make it (more) usable as a tool for collaboration, this study analyzes a corpus of naturally-occurring public Twitter messages (tweets), focusing on the functions and uses of the @ sign and the coherence of exchanges. The findings reveal a surprising degree of conversationality, facilitated especially by the use of @ as a mark- 

er of addressivity, and shed light on the limitations of 

Twitter’s current design for collaborative use.

This paper brings a sociological perspective to an area dominated by social psychology, that of persuasion. It discusses how networks can be used to describe context for persuasive messages. It has been previously argued that network awareness, having knowledge of how networks affect behavior and perception, combined with  knowledge of the networks in some part of society such as an organization or region, is important for innovation and productivity[1]. This paper expands on this by introducing the concept of “social context.” While the idea of location in social structure is not new, the difference here is that this paper talks not just about abstract location in social space, but the more concrete realization of it in communication networks based on cell phones, social networking software, IM, email and other new technology is. I argue that the ability to observe and measure these networks can give insight into the user’s behavior, attitudes and worldview and  provide a context for persuasion to take place. 

Social networking sites persuade millions of users each day to adopt specific behaviors.  To understand this phenomenon in the context of persuasive technology, we analyzed how persuasion takes place in leading social networking sites from two different countries: Facebook in the U.S. and Mixi in Japan. We compared the two services on four persuasion goals: creating profile pages, inviting friends, responding to content by friends, and returning to the site often. Our analysis reveals the differences and similarities in how Facebook and Mixi are designed to influence users toward the achievement of these four goals. In general, Facebook’s persuasive design is more assertive and mechanistic, while Mixi’s approach, by comparison, is subtle and indirect. These persuasion styles seem to map generally to cultural differences between the U.S. and Japan. 

Keywords: persuasion, captology, social networking, persuasive technology, behavior chain, persuasive design, cultural comparison, Mixi, Facebook.