What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
Published 26 April 2010Open access
Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, Sue Moon
Citations6,692
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TL;DR
This work is the first quantitative study on the entire Twittersphere and information diffusion on it and finds 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.
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.
Keywords
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