%0 Journal Article %1 Huberman2008 %A Huberman, Bernardo A. %A Romero, Daniel M. %A Wu, Fang %D 2008 %J CoRR %K twitter socialnetwork %T Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope %U http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/0812.1045v1 %V abs/0812.1045 %X Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the declared set of friends and followers.

@article{Huberman2008, abstract = {Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the declared set of friends and followers.}, added-at = {2010-04-10T15:47:52.000+0200}, author = {Huberman, Bernardo A. and Romero, Daniel M. and Wu, Fang}, bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}, biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/297d9d820a2ae01f977945974f376673f/obbakilla}, description = {http://2bloggen.org/2009/02/19/empirical-study-twitter-is-not-a-social-network-by-patrick-philippe-meyer/ (review)}, ee = {http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.1045}, interhash = {15d255f636e73eb2c235393752bffb88}, intrahash = {97d9d820a2ae01f977945974f376673f}, journal = {CoRR}, keywords = {twitter socialnetwork}, review = {The authors argue that the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. “Scarcity of attention and the daily rythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention.” Using Twitter to study social interactions, the authors find that the “driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the ‘declared’ set of friends and followers.” The authors compiled a large dataset of Twitter 309,740 users. They obtained the number of followers and followees for each user along with the content and datestamp of all her posts. They also identified the number of directed (@name) posts and definited a user’s friend as a person whom the user has directed at least two posts to. The researchers were thus able to compare the number of friends a user has with the number of followers and followees they declared. http://2bloggen.org/2009/02/19/empirical-study-twitter-is-not-a-social-network-by-patrick-philippe-meyer/}, timestamp = {2010-04-10T15:47:52.000+0200}, title = {Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope}, url = {http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/0812.1045v1}, volume = {abs/0812.1045}, year = 2008 }