Twitter Quo Vadis: Is Twitter Bitter or Are Tweets Sweet?

This research explores the phenomenon of Twitter to better understand the diffusion of this new technology as a social networking tool. Twitter is a real-time messaging service centered on the question, “What are you doing?” This question is answered with short posts of 140 characters or less. Twitter´s `tweets´ are sent to any number of people who choose to follow a person´s Twitter updates. Twitter´s recent growth has been impressive. Based on its growth curve, Twitter appears to be in the Early Adopter stage and is showing signs of entering the Early Majority stage. As Twitter continues to diffuse into the social networking arena, we find great potential for it as a communication medium. Twitter has shown how a medium for social networking and micro-blogging can be used as both a tool for delivering essential information, i.e., news, as well as a medium for delivering non-essential information, i.e., personal messages. We find that although Twitter´s impressive rate of diffusion continues to grow, it is beginning to wane.