Authors report on a new kind of group conversation on Twitter they call a group chat. These chats are periodic, synchronized group conversations focused on specific topics and they exist at a massive scale. The groups and the members of these groups are not explicitly known. Rather, members agree on a hashtag and a meeting time to discuss a subject of interest.
Group chats are similar to virtual communities in that the primary venue for communicating is online. As with other communities, the purpose is to exchange knowledge, to share experiences, to provide empathy and generally feel part of a community. Also, groups chats can be sprawled out geographically and thus they en- able a way to meet that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. However, they differ from virtual communities in that they use the Twitter platform as a real-time mechanism to communicate in groups. The real-time nature of these conversations imparts a live feeling that is hard to duplicate in other online venues such as forums. Another key difference is that these groups are implicit and therefore not easily discoverable.
In this connection we would like to point attention to our Twicus application. Actually, this application creates Group Chats on Twitter. One of the obvious applied areas is the second screen application for discussing TV show.
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