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.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.