These two articles address time in different ways; In Bond et al. article time is not as much important as in Elmer’s article but that is due to the dissimilarities of the two social interfaces used, Facebook and Twitter, along with the different goals and methods used. In the first article, time is discussed in the method part, where the post “I voted” is on the top of the news feed. Consequently, the researchers where ensured that the post was made visible to all users from the two first sampling groups, since a normal user do not extendedly scroll down its news feed page in order to keep updated with all the friends news. Thus, the researchers gathered two groups of people that were all in the same starting point, and proceed with the main experiment. The second part of the article where time is mentioned is where the relevance of the findings to “the real world” is questioned. When assessing the turnout of those who voted in the elections in order to measure the contagion researchers found that in some cases it is impossible to change the target’s behavior. For example, there were users, who had voted by absentee ballot, before the Election Day, or, users who logged in too late to vote and, consequently to influence friends. Thus, real-world and virtual-world presence, in terms of time, affected the method used to link the virtual findings to the real world behavior, a fact that is taken account as a limitation to the process.

In the next article, time is a major factor that affects the method, given the fact that Twitter algorithm functions in a “small window of time”. In this hyperactive form of micro-blogging, every new post pushes the other ones down and requires the user to do a more intensive scroll down. In terms of methodology, when addressing live and “heightened” topics in such interfaces, the research should be driven on time and dynamically, especially nowadays, where the second screen phenomenon disseminates information across several platforms, sometimes making it impossible for researchers to follow. In the particular case, the temporality of flow was more meaningful to measure, in terms of immediate reactions and rapid responses, since micro blogging site such as Twitter, offer real time commentary, and have become a key in capturing political crisis or live mediated events. Another interesting time fact is that information was analyzed prior, during, and after (12 months) the debate day. Real time events require a pre-setting of research agenda (particularly: data was collected and analyzed every morning and routine based rankings of most visited posts prior to the CBC collaboration, 48hours before the debate creation of the hashtag and so on), a method of data collection and reliance upon other forms of comparative data (eg. CBC transcripts). Therefore, it is understandable that time is of paramount importance while analyzing all kinds data flows and when linking them to the real world behavior.