The Case of Drupal and Twitter

// Microblogging is a popular form of social media that has quickly permeated both enterprise and open source software development communities. However, how exactly open source communities can leverage microblogging isn't yet well understood. // SOCIAL MEDIA HAS become an important means of communication in modern society, as evidenced by the widespread use of wikis, blogs, and social networking sites for both personal and professional purposes within organizations. Among the different social media, a significant one is microblogging. 1 Originally intended to provide brief personal text updates, it has rapidly expanded to play a more informative and interactive role in communication and collaboration across a wide variety of organizations and endeavors, including software development. Most studies of microblogging have focused on enterprise settings, with one in particular focusing on various types of interactions such as asking questions, sharing information , coordinating, and broadcasting updates. 4 The prospect of integrating microblogging tools into software development environments seems especially promising. 5,6 Microblogging is used extensively in open source software (OSS) communities, but that usage hasn't been studied in-depth. 7 To help OSS communities steer their micro-blogging efforts toward an optimal utilization, we investigated micro-blogging's current use in OSS development. Specifically, we looked at microblogging in the Drupal OSS community, with its more than 17,000 globally distributed developers. Drupal is a popular, award-winning content management system that has more than 10 years of history and seven major releases. In contrast to enterprise settings that use microblogging tools such as Yammer, StatysNet, Communote, and Present.ly, 8 the Drupal community has used Twitter since 2007 (see the " What Is Twitter? " sidebar).