Larry Page should have been in a good mood. It was the fall of 2007, and Google’s cofounder was in the middle of a five-day tour of his company’s European operations in Zurich, London, Oxford, and Dublin. The trip had been fun, a chance to get a ground-floor look at Google’s ever-expanding empire.
At this point, most everyone may know what Twitter is, but who’s using it, what they’re saying and who they’re saying it to are increasingly research fodder.
Lexicographers at Oxford University Press released findings today, based on 1.5 million tweets from January to April, showing that the average message was 15 words, with an average of 10.69 words per sentence and 1.4 sentences per tweet. Ten percent of tweets contain a question, says Oxford, publisher of the Oxford dictionary and other reference works.
You will, along with many millions of others, likely make an emergency appointment with your psychologist this week. After all, the words of Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College in Oxford, England, have probably slapped their syllables against your very core. Social-networking sites, she said, like Facebook (it’s interesting how Facebook seems to have come to symbolize all social networking), are infantilizing the human mind.
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