This document analyzes Twitter as both a social network and a news media platform. It summarizes a study of Twitter data from June 2009 which found: - Information spreads very quickly on Twitter, with most retweets occurring within an hour and retweet trees rarely exceeding a depth of 6 layers. - While a few users have over a million followers, the average number of followers and tweets follows a power law distribution, with a few highly connected users. - Retweets are an effective way for information to spread to a wide audience, with the median retweet reaching more people than the average tweet. However, people tend to retweet only a small subset of their followers.

1. What is Twitter, a Social
Network or a News Media?
Speaker: ChinHui Chen

3. Author
Haewoon Kwak, KAIST PHD
http://an.kaist.ac.kr/~haewoon/wp/

4. Agenda
Introduction
Topological
Analysis
Ranking Twitter
Users
Trending The
Trends

5. Introduction

6. Introduction
Goal:
topological characteristics of Twitter
its power as a new medium of information
sharing.

7. First quantitative study on the entire Twitter
sphere and information diffusion on it.

8. What is twitter?

11. Founded
San Francisco, California,United States
Founder
Jack Dorsey
Evan Williams
Biz Stone
Launched
July 15, 2006
wiki

12. Revenue
US $150 million (projected 2010)
Alexa rank
9 (March 2011)
Users
200 million (March 2011)
Employees
450 (2011)
wiki

15. Kelly, Ryan, ed (August 12, 2009). "Twitter Study – August 2009"

17. Dataset
June 6th - June 31st, 2009
User profiles: 41.7 million
4,262 unique trending topics
Tweets: 106 millions

18. Available Online
We make our dataset publicly available online at:
http://an.kaist.ac.kr/traces/WWW2010.html

19. Topological Analysis

20. Basic Analysis
Followers vs.Tweets
Reciprocity
Degree of Separation
Homophily

21. Basic Analysis
complementary cumulative distribution function
40 users > a million followers

22. Followers / Tweets

23. Impact of Retweets

24. What’s Retweet?

26. Target
How exactly does information
spread on Twitter?

27. Audience Size of Retweet
Retweet Trees
Temporal Analysis of Retweet
Favoritism in Retweet
Outline

28. Audience Size of Retweet

29. 1. median < avg
-> many tweets have a large
number of additional recipients
2. #1000
3. power of retweeting
-> user spread power ->
determines important -> collective

30. Retweet Trees

31. Retweet Trees

32. Retweet Trees
height 1 : 95.8%
97.6%
less than 6 degrees of separation,
height < 6
no trees > 11 hops
user dist -> power law

33. Temporal Analysis
How soon appear / How long last

34. Temporal Analysis

35. Temporal Analysis

36. The strength of Twitter as a medium for
information diffusion stands out by the
speed of retweets.

37. Favoritism in Retweet
kY(k) ~ 1
kY(k) ~ k

38. Favoritism in Retweet

39. People only retweets from a small number of
people and only a subset of a user’s followers
actually retweet.

40. Realtime Search

41. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=iphone

42. http://www.google.com/landing/realtime/

43. TREC 2011

45. TREC 2011

46. Thoughts
Buy in
Response

47. Tweet -> Product
Users sell Product
Someone buy it
Predict what kind of product will be
popular?

48. A new UI?

50. Thanks