Washington, with its throngs wielding mobile phones, is the USA’s most socially networked city, according to a survey that ranks the 100 best and worst Twitter Towns. The survey will appear Tuesday in the April issue of Men’s Health magazine.
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Surprised that Seattle — chock-full of Twitter-happy information-technology professionals — didn’t take the top position in the ranking of those who use Web-based applications to generate and share information? David Zinczenko, editor in chief of Men’s Health, says he was, a little. But he says it makes sense that the nation’s capital is in the top slot.
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D.C. is where staying connected can get out the vote. (President) Obama is an avid Twitter user. More D.C.-based government agencies have begun using social networks, and it’s an area concentrated with non-profits and trade organizations, he says.
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Susannah Fox, associate director of the Washington-based Pew Research Center’s Internet American Life Project, says she’s all over social media for work — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. When issues I study are in the news, I tweet to infect the public conversation with data, says Fox, who has 5,600 Twitter followers.
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Researchers used criteria from half a dozen resources, Zinczenko says, including the number of Facebook and LinkedIn users per capita, as well as overall Twitter usage. Marketing and advertising firm Chitika analyzed traffic generated by social networks, including Myspace and Digg. Then the percentage of households in each town that use chat rooms and read blogs was factored in.
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Whose social networking status is wanting? El Paso ranked last — but that might just suggest that the city’s residents are happier with their offline lives, says psychologist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.
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When people are gratified and fulfilled in their…