Thing 10 : Searching Twitter

I had set up a Twitter account a while back and now hardly ever check it. One reason is that a lot of creepy people wanted to follow my tweets and that concerned me. For that reason alone, I would be a little skeptical of using it as a research tool. Many of the posts out there would not be useful to the average researcher looking for accurate data. However, I can see researchers in the fields of sociology, psychology, and possibly history mining tweets to find the reactions of the common people to historical events. I checked out the recent topics of BP oil spill and Joran Van Der Sloot. Although it is interesting to look through a few of the observations made by fellow Tweeters, I do not think there is much in the way of factual material there. The one Tweeter I saw that really displays why students should be careful of using Twitter as fact purported to be the PR dept. of British Petroleum but was actually someone only using the account name to give his opinions on the spill.