An Exploratory Study on Software Microblogger Behaviors

Microblogging services are growing rapidly in the recent years. Twitter, one of the most popular microblogging sites, has gained more than 500 millions users. Thousands of developers are also using Twitter to communicate with one another and microblog about software-related topics such as programming languages, code libraries, etc. Understanding the behaviors of software microbloggers is one of the needed first steps toward building automated tools to encourage software microblogging activities and harness software microblogging to improve various software engineering activities. In this paper, we investigate the behaviors of software microbloggers in terms of their microblogging frequency, generated contents, and interactions among themselves. Our study is based on a dataset that contains more than 13 million microblogs generated by more than 42 thousands software microbloggers.