It was a fairly quiet August afternoon. The air was muggy. The sun beamed down. Music beats were overflowing from my headphones at work. Typical day in the District, but then…. it happened!
Slate posted an article titled “How Black People Use Twitter,” and my timeline as I knew it had changed forever. Moving forward, all tweets would be take place in AB time – Anno #BrownTwitterBird, the year of the Brown Twitter Bird.
I know I’m being overly dramatic, but on that day, the network of people I follow flooded my timeline. Several hundred tweets and follow-up blog posts appeared. Some in agreement with and some against the points Slate writer Farhad Manjoo in his piece, but nearly all posts gave a specific mention to the illustration which became known as the #browntwitterbird.
Thanks to a inspiration of a few and the creativity of the masses in the hours and days which followed, we now have several special edition Brown Twitter Birds for our viewing pleasure.
Why Bring Up the #browntwitterbird now? Why on Socially Diverse?
One of my colleagues does a really great job of sending around articles to the group of us who work specifically on social media projects. Yesterday he sent around a piece with this subject line: “Study: America isn’t the center of the Twitterverse.”
The article shares several interesting stats, but I found this piece the most interesting:
Fact is, while the U.S. is one of the world’s top Twitter nations garnering 25 percent of the world’s tweets, it falls significantly below Asia as a region. According to a recent Semiocast study, users in Asia, mainly located in Japan, Indonesia and South Korea account for 37 percent of all tweets out of 2.9 million messages tracked. And while Asia is showing growth from March to June in 2010, North America as an aggregate is declining.
Given that perspective, I wonder if an Asian Twitter Bird is in the works…
I hope not, but I do hope that we will begin to see more reports that take a look into some of the larger social platforms in Asia and share insights about how the channels are being used, popular conversations topics, etc.
If you have any resources to share, please email me at james.walker [at] prprescriptions.com or leave a comment.
—
This is a re-post from the socially diverse project.
It’s been interesting to watch this whole Black Twitter Bird phenomenon, as well as the original Twitter After Dark phenomenon that started it(and I don’t touch with a 10 foot pole, trying to keep my stream clean). I was talking about it with Wayne Sutton a couple of weeks ago and I commented on Penelope Trunk’s blog on Twitter tips that we (and the Slate article) should be referring to those tags as hood tags or young black and hip tags or something that doesn’t lump all the black folks in one basket. I’m looking forward to Asian twitter bird too, (and Latino Bird for that matter…)