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What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?
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| Citations: | 934 - 11 self |
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@MISC{Kwak_whatis,
author = {Haewoon Kwak and Changhyun Lee and Hosung Park and Sue Moon},
title = {What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?},
year = {}
}
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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.
Keyphrases
news medium social network social relation low reciprocity user profile topological characteristic twitter user human social network short effective diameter follower-following topology analysis non-power-law follower distribution 140-character limit new medium entire twitter site follow others
