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At the largest view, all the subscribers to Twitter can be viewed as a vast community of millions, all using the same communication tool. But within those millions are spawned countless smaller fluid communities of people linked together by their lists of followers or sharing of similar interests. Research (5) has shown that Twitter users communicate mostly with a small circle of users, regardless of their total of followers and followings.
This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends.(5)
Tech journalist and blogger Clive Thompson complains that many tweets are mundane, but that over the course of hundreds and thousands of such tedium, an "ambient awareness" evolves that 'creates greater empathy toward, and understanding between, groups of people. Within the patterns of minutia about office life and television habits, argues Thompson, dwells an online cosmic consciousness.' (2)
Twitter and other constant-contact media give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It's practically collectivist - you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself. (2)
Inserting a hashtag into a tweet message enables that tweet to be found on twitter search among other messages discussing the same topic. An example is #nbn which stands for National Broadband Network. By using Twitter's search facility one joins a community of twitterers also interested in the same subject. Tweets and responses can be sent from the search page.
A group of tweeters all following the same story, making and responding to tweets on the subject, can be seen as a fluid, temporary community which has assembled like the townsfolk in the local hall, to discuss a topic of importance.
Each capital city in Australia has its own users' groups, such as the Melbourne Underground Twitter Brigade (MTUB), which organizes regular face-to-face social gatherings. While subscribers to these groups can be seen as constituting a virtual community while online, they successfully bridge the gap into the real world, members reporting valuable friendships and contacts being made at events. Nonetheless it's obvious that the one common interest that brings this community together is the use of twitter as a communication platform. Other interests may coincide, such as an interest in social media, but remain secondary.
As a member of a political party, I am informed frequently by tweeters both offical and otherwise of forthcoming events, policy announcements and meetings. Thus a real world community is echoed in the 'twitterverse'.
Each user's followers and followings lists can be seen as a community relative to only that specific user. It can be seen as a purely objective, fluid community, forever morphing, as friends are added or removed to the lists.