What is Twitter, a Social Network or a New Media? [Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moo] mined ~42mm profiles, tweets, and trends to better understand the nature of Twtter. The broke it into 3 parts:
- Network Analysis - understanding the structure of the Twitter network.
- Popularity Analysis - based on # of followers, pagerank, and retrweets
- Information Diffusion - how (re)tweeting diffuses through the network.
Here are the major outcomes:
- There is basically (basically) a 1-1 correlation with # of tweets, and # of followers/ followings. Tweet more, get more followers.
- Low reciprocity. Due to the asymmetrical nature of twitter (ie I can follow you without you following me back), only 78% of links are one way.
- Degree of separation: on twitter, there are 4 degrees of separation. This is really unintuitive at first due to the directedness of the network, but if you consider the "super nodes" on twitter (eg Oprah), this makes sense. Conversely, on facebook, most poeple can't be friends with Oprah.
- Homophily: People who have a lot of followers tend to be friends with people who have a lot of followers. The more followers you have, the more likely your friends are in other timezones.
- User Popularity: Ranking by followers is interesting, but they're actually not generating the most retweets (this is a better measure of influence).
- Trending items vs google: items stay trending on Twitter longer than Google due to the retweeting phenomenon.Most active periods are less than a week, but 31% are 1 day long.
- Retweet impact: (this is weird) regardless of how many followers you have, if your tweet is retweeted, 1000 people will see it. Of course, if you have more followers, your tweet is more likely to be retweeted, but a retweet view remains constant at 1000 incremental people.
- On average, if they happen, first retweets occur ~1 hour after the tweet, 2nd - 6th occur within 10 minutes. Crazy diffusion rate.
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