• 14 researchers with a shared interest in how ICT affects work, life, and society;
• they are working in the same research institute, but located over various parts of the building;
• they frequently work elsewhere, for instance during client visits, workshops, conferences;
• they are all working on several different projects at a time;
• they are well acquainted with one another, though not co-working on a daily basis;
• they share a feeling that cohesion and knowledge sharing in the group could be improved. 

Twitter usage13 People in the group used Twitter during the experiment, of which 5 were already using it. Usage statistics (averaged over all participants, those new to Twitter, and those experienced with Twitter) are shown in the table below. The table clearly shows that the new Twitter users twittered less and were following far fewer people outside the group than the experienced Twitter users. During the experiment, 2 new Twitter users gave up on Twitter.

Twitter evaluation

From the people who used Twitter, 11 completed the Twitter evaluation form. The form contained 10 statements, to be answered on a 5-point Likert scale (from -2 to 2 for “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”). The spider graph below shows the results.

The graph shows that, overall, Twitter is evaluated quite positively. Twitter scores extremely high on the aspect of getting to know your colleagues more personally. Furthermore, Twitter scores very high on ease of use, and the benefits for work clearly seem to outweigh the costs of using it. However, Twitter scores poorly on the aspects of finding information on a certain topic or finding an expert on a certain topic.

Twitter experiences

An individual brainstorm (reflecting on personal experiences with Twitter, and writing these down on post-its) was followed by a group discussion on four themes. 10 People participated in this brainstorm and discussion. Highlights are presented below.

Likes & Dislikes

Likes:

• It’s nice to “follow” your colleagues: what have they been doing, what are they up to.
• You don’t necessarily have to react to what others are twittering.
• Twitter can be used like an RSS feed to follow developments on a topic or the lives of celebrities.
• Twitter is easy to install and use, and it easily integrates into tools like Facebook and Blogger.

Dislikes:

• Requests from unknown people who want to follow you; how did these people find me?
• No option to tweet to different groups, for instance, just to colleagues or to friends.
• It’s difficult to find a good balance of how many followers/following (Quitter!!!).
• Some people twitter too much, they “bury” the tweets of others.
• The “avalanche” of unread tweets if you didn’t log into Twitter for a while.
• For “quality” information you should turn to weblogs, not to Twitter.

Staying in sync & Staying in touch

Staying in sync:

• You can get a better feeling about what’s going on in some projects.
• Twitter can be used to get up to date on general news in your field.
• It helped to stay in sync and in touch when colleagues were out of office.
• Twitter doesn’t help you to stay in sync if you don’t have the time to check it frequently.
• The mobile client does not support URLs, so tweets using URLs are difficult to interpret.

Staying in touch:

• It provides a sense of being in touch, albeit fragmented (not always, and without an overview).
• It’s difficult to get into an ongoing conversation.
• It works really well to stay in touch with people who are far away.
• It lowers the threshold to stay in touch with people as it is less intrusive than IM, email, phone.
• Being aware of relatively small details (what are people doing, and where they are) gives a good sense of being in touch.

Success stories & Disappointments

Success stories:

• I didn’t realize how much I would appreciate to stay in touch with my colleagues.
• Quickly got several responses on a request for input, ideas, or a translation.

Disappointments:

• Being too busy to use Twitter, a nagging feeling “I should have twittered more”.
• Time zone differences; too many tweets the next morning.
• The Twitter site experienced some problems and some of my tweets went missing.
• The Twitter client crashed and needed to be reinstalled.

Usability & “Other”

Usability:

• Some functionality is hidden or simply unknown, for instance the use of “#”.
• Difficult to compare the lists of “followers” and “following”.
• There are too many Twitter clients (PC and mobile) which is confusing.
• Mobile clients to not offer the support that is actually needed (e.g., overview of new tweets, being able to follow links).

“Other”:

• Reciprocity is a problem; some replies seem to be missing.
• Still able to use it even though I don’t have much time.
• Still don’t have the feeling that it integrated well into my work.

Conclusion

It is clear that Twitter is a useful tool for maintaining a sense of being “in touch” with your colleagues, especially when they are often out of office or when you otherwise don’t see them often. A lack of time to frequently use Twitter is the main obstacle for staying “in touch”. But ease of use and the general opinion that it is fun to use, alleviate this and keep people motivated to use it.

Although Twitter allows one to send a request to followers, or to exchange information by sharing interesting URLs, for the people in this group it did not (yet) provide clear benefits with regard to more traditional aspects of knowledge sharing, like finding information on a topic or finding an expert on a topic.

Probably the best indicator for the success of this experiment is that, at the end of the evaluation workshop, all people who were still using Twitter indicated that they would continue to use the tool.