February 16, 2010
Social media usage won't hurt your grades
University of New Hampshire study says more Facebook use won't negatively affect academics
Rising social media usage has no effect on lower grades, according to a study conducted by the University of New Hampshire. While there have been reports that claim the exact opposite, this is the latest investigation into the relationship between academic output and social networking.The most important finding of the study is that 63% of students categorized as heavy users received As and Bs, while the other 37% received Bs and lower. Similarly, 65% of students marked as light users also received As and Bs, while the remaining 35% received Bs and lower.
The study, carried out by Whittemore School of Business and Economics professor of marketing Chuck Martin and his marketing research class Facebook, investigated the relationship between grades and student usage of various social sites: Facebook, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, Myspace and LinkedIn (listed in order of most used by the particular group of students that participated in the study).
Unsurprisingly, the study found that 89% of students said they use the sites for social reasons, while 79% said they used the social sites for entertainment. Only 26% use the sites for educational purposes and, still fewer, only 16% of students use the sites for professional reasons.
In the study, Facebook and YouTube were cited as the most popular sites, used by 96% and 84% of students, respectively.
In total, 1,127 of the 11,958 students at UNH participated in the study.
While this study was, by its very nature, limited in scope, we can still draw wider implications from its conclusions. The argument is that social media sites can be as distracting and detrimental as just about any other hobby or non-academic interest.
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What is Twitter?
Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Where did the idea for Twitter come from?
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
How is Twitter built?
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
How do you make money from Twitter?
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
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