This book has won the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award 2014. Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has evolved from a niche service to a mass phenomenon; it has become instrumental for everyday communication as well as for political debates, crisis communication, marketing, and cultural participation. But the basic idea behind it has stayed the same: users may post short messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters and follow the updates posted by other users. Drawing on the experience of leading international Twitter researchers from a variety of disciplines and contexts, this is the first book to document the various notions and concepts of Twitter communication, providing a detailed and comprehensive overview of current research into the uses of Twitter. It also presents methods for analyzing Twitter data and outlines their practical application in different research contexts.

Dr. Katrin Weller is an information scientist working at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany. She is author of Knowledge Representation in the Social Semantic Web (2010) and co-author of a monthly column on social media trends for Password, a German journal for information professionals. Dr. Axel Bruns is an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. He is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008). Dr. Jean Burgess is Associate Professor of Digital Media and Director of Research Training in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. She is the author of Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (2012). Dr. Merja Mahrt is a media and communication scholar currently working at Heinrich Heine University, Germany. She is the spokesperson of the interdisciplinary researchers group Science and the Internet. Dr. Cornelius Puschmann is an internet researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin's School of Library and Information Science, an associate researcher at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and a visiting fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.