What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?

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 charac...

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Main Authors: KWAK, Haewoon, LEE, Changhyun, PARK, Hosung: MOON
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6101
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7104/viewcontent/1772690.1772751.pdf
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spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-71042021-09-29T12:40:31Z What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? KWAK, Haewoon LEE, Changhyun PARK, Hosung: MOON 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. 2010-04-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6101 info:doi/10.1145/1772690.1772751 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7104/viewcontent/1772690.1772751.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Twitter Online social network Reciprocity Homophily Degree of separation Retweet Information diffusion Influential PageRank Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic Twitter
Online social network
Reciprocity
Homophily
Degree of separation
Retweet
Information diffusion
Influential
PageRank
Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
spellingShingle Twitter
Online social network
Reciprocity
Homophily
Degree of separation
Retweet
Information diffusion
Influential
PageRank
Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
KWAK, Haewoon
LEE, Changhyun
PARK, Hosung: MOON
What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
description 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.
format text
author KWAK, Haewoon
LEE, Changhyun
PARK, Hosung: MOON
author_facet KWAK, Haewoon
LEE, Changhyun
PARK, Hosung: MOON
author_sort KWAK, Haewoon
title What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
title_short What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
title_full What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
title_fullStr What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
title_full_unstemmed What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
title_sort what is twitter, a social network or a news media?
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2010
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6101
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7104/viewcontent/1772690.1772751.pdf
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