Tracing Twitter: The rise of a microblogging platform

This article uses ‘interpretative flexibility’ as a concept to analyse the early development of one specific microblogging site: Twitter. By tracing microblogging’s instable meaning in its early years (2006–10), we try to understand how the platform’s meaning was shaped by a variety of human and non-human actors: technological design, usage, content and business models. By tracking microblogging’s instable meaning in its infant years, we may get a fuller understanding of how this new technology plays out in a complex Internet milieu of push-and-pull forces. Reconstructing interpretative flexibility while the technology is still in flux – and thus open to manoeuvring – may give rise to new perspectives on how power relationships transpire in a networked environment.