Twitter
Computer-mediated communication has been around for some time but has risen in popularity with the progression of cross-platform Web 2.0 applications and services. Microblogging is a social media service that allows users to send short messages to people subscribed to their streams. With Twitter, users can send messages of 140 characters or less. These messages – called tweets – can be sent and retrieved through a variety of front-end clients, including text messaging, email, the web and other third-party applications. Each Twitter user has a profile, designated as private or public, though most are public. Twitterers can choose to follow other Twitterers, which means subscribing to their tweet streams. Consequently, Twitterers have both followers who read them and those whose streams they are following themselves. In addition, all publicly available tweets are also visible on the public stream and are searchable for as long as Twitter is able to store the information. The exponential adoption of Twitter makes the collection of this data for research purposes an increasingly challenging issue.