ABSTRACT
Microblogging soware provides a kind of quick and easy instant messaging service for the Web. It is usually used to publish links to interesting content and post updates on what users are currently doing, where they are, what they are thinking about etc. It forms a key part of an emerging set of real-time information tools that allow the generation and consumption of nearly instantaneous information. Sometimes referred to as the real-time Web (Phelan et al. 2011; Bermingham and Smeaton 2010), other examples of these tools include Facebook’s newsfeeds, data streams provided by Web apps and new generations of mobile, sensor-based and ubiquitous computer applications.
