Regarding Twitter

All the contents in this blog posts are taken from this paper.

Twitter.com is a online social network used by millions of people around the world to stay connected to their friends, family members and coworkers through their computers and mobile phones. The interface allows users to post short messages (up to 140 characters) that can be read by any other Twitter user. 

Users declare the people they are interested in following, in which case they get notified when that person has posted a new message. A user who is being followed by another user does not necessarily have to reciprocate by following them back, which makes the links of the Twitter social network directed.

Twitter users are able to post direct and indirect updates. Direct posts are used when a user aims her update to a specific person, whereas indirect updates are used when the update is meant for anyone that cares to read it.

Even though direct updates are used to communicate directly with a specific person, they are public and anyone can see them.

FRIEND : Here, a user’s friend is a person whom the user has directed at least two posts to.

Research Findings :

• the number of posts initially increases as the number of followers increases but it eventually saturates.
• the number of posts increases as the number of friends increases
• the users who receive attention from many people will post more often than users who receive little attention.
• in order to predict how active a Twitter user is, the number of friends is a more accurate signal than the number of his followers.
• most users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followees they declared.
• the cost of declaring a new followee is very low compared to the cost of maintaining a friends (i.e. exchanging directed messages with other users). Hence, the number of people a user actually communicates with eventually stops increasing while the number of followees can continue to grow indefinitely.
• users with more followers and friends will be more active at posting than those with a small number of followers and friends.
• a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, even when using a very weak definition of “friend” (i.e. anyone who a user has directed a post to at least twice) we find that Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends. On the other hand, users with many followers or followees post updates more infrequently than those with few followers or followees.