Recently, me and other colleagues have been studying how the way people appropriate technologies shape the values these technologies will have for certain social groups. In a recently research conducted by myself, with Gabriela Zago and Jandré Batista at Universidade Católica de Pelotas, about Twitter and Plurk social appropriations by Brazilian users, we found out many interesting points about this subject.  Although both systems are part of what is frequently called “microblogging” or “micromessaging” system, it is interesting how the social networks are creating new meanings and new values through these tools.

This research has been conducted since 2008. We already made a survey with almost 1000 answers, conducted 30 interviews and mapped 10 social networks within 2 degrees of separation. In this post, I’m going to share some ideas we are working on and some perceptions we already have.

Twitter Appropriation

Twitter seems to be used as a tool to gather information rather than a tool for conversation. For most researched users, receiving qualified information is the key value Twitter holds. In fact, social values such as reputation, number of followers and number of retweets are regarded by users as ways to measure the impact they have in their social networks. Many of them actively engage in trying to increase these numbers, by either publishing new information or retweeting information they think their social network didn’t have access to.

Conversation, on the other hand, also happens, but it is not regarded with the same value. While users constantly exchange information, most of conversations observed had less than three turns and engage very few people. Users argue that it is difficult to follow conversations in Twitter and the context is usually lost because of the non-synchronous nature of the tool.

Plurk Appropriation

Plurk is a very less used micromessaging tool. However, holds a completely different appropriation. Social networks observed there tend to focus on conversation rather than information. Users like to talk, to share thoughts, to maintain social ties.  Although information also appears, it is rather rare to find the same usage Twitter holds.

Users argue that Plurk system is much more capable of maintaining the context for conversations to emerge. Even if  used asynchronously, Plurk holds a better system to follow social interaction and to keep contexts for each conversation. Thus, the value associated is social. Users argue that while Twitter keep them informed, Plurk allows them to keep in touch with their social networks,  to make plans and to talk to friends.

While both services seem to present similar tools for social networks to congregate among them and to create and share values, it is interesting to see that their mechanisms and interface can also shape the values these networks create. Because Twitter is rather difficult to be used as a non-synchronous place for conversations, Plurk holds this place for the studied social networks.