research-article
Authors: Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, Sue Moon
WWW '10: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
Pages 591 - 600
Published: 26 April 2010 Publication History
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Abstract
Twitter, a microblogging service less than three years old, commands more than 41 million users as of July 2009 and is growing fast. Twitter users tweet about any topic within the 140-character limit and follow others to receive their tweets. The goal of this paper is to study the topological characteristics of Twitter and its power as a new medium of information sharing.
We have crawled the entire Twitter site and obtained 41.7 million user profiles, 1.47 billion social relations, 4,262 trending topics, and 106 million tweets. In its follower-following topology analysis we have found a non-power-law follower distribution, a short effective diameter, and low reciprocity, which all mark a deviation from known characteristics of human social networks [28]. In order to identify influentials on Twitter, we have ranked users by the number of followers and by PageRank and found two rankings to be similar. Ranking by retweets differs from the previous two rankings, indicating a gap in influence inferred from the number of followers and that from the popularity of one's tweets. We have analyzed the tweets of top trending topics and reported on their temporal behavior and user participation. We have classified the trending topics based on the active period and the tweets and show that the majority (over 85%) of topics are headline news or persistent news in nature. A closer look at retweets reveals that any retweeted tweet is to reach an average of 1,000 users no matter what the number of followers is of the original tweet. Once retweeted, a tweet gets retweeted almost instantly on next hops, signifying fast diffusion of information after the 1st retweet.
To the best of our knowledge this work is the first quantitative study on the entire Twittersphere and information diffusion on it.
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Index Terms
What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
Applied computing
Law, social and behavioral sciences
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Published In
WWW '10: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web
April 2010
1407 pages
ISBN:9781605587998
DOI:10.1145/1772690
- General Chairs:
- Michael Rappa
North Carolina State University, USA
, - Paul Jones
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
, - Program Chairs:
- Juliana Freire
University of Utah, USA
, - Soumen Chakrabarti
Indian Institute of Technology, India
Copyright © 2010 International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2).
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 26 April 2010
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Author Tags
- degree of separation
- homophily
- influential
- information diffusion
- online social network
- pagerank
- reciprocity
- retweet
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Conference
WWW '10
WWW '10: The 19th International World Wide Web Conference
April 26 - 30, 2010
North Carolina, Raleigh, USA
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%
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