Term Paper

What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?

E- Business

Master of Business Consulting

Summer Semester 2012

Prepared By:

Omofonmwan Nelson (241709)

Submitted To:

Prof. Dr. Eduard Heindl

Hochschule Furtwangen University
 Declaration:

I hereby declare that most of the work done in this document is

written by the author of this document.

The list of the literatures is also mentioned with reference.

This document is based on scientific paper with the title, what is

Twitter, a Social network or News media?

Name Signature
 Table of contents:

1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..4

1.1 Purpose of this document……………………………………………………4

2. Twitter……………………………………………………………………………………...4

2.1 What is Twitter………………………………………………………...............4

2.2 Twitter Space Crawl………………………………………………………………5

2.3 Twitter user Profile……………………………………………………………….5

3. Trending Topics……………………………………………………………………………5

3.1 Users Participation in Trending Topics…………………………………..5

4. Tweets…………………………………………………………………………………………6

4.1 Followers’ versus Tweets……………………………………………………….7

4.2 Twitter Services…………………………………………………………………………………..8

5. Growth of Twitter……………………………………………………………………..…9

5.1 Twitter Ranking…………………………………………………………………..11

5.2 PageRank…………………………………………………………………………….12

6. Geographical Distribution…………………………………………………………12

7. Impact of Retweets…………………………………………………………………..13

7.1 Audience Size of Retweet………………………………………………..…13

7.2 Retweet Trees…………………………………………………………………….14

8. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………..15

9. Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..15
Introduction:

This document helps the readers to understand what Twitter actually

means, and to differentiate Twitter from other social networks. Unlike
facebook, it does not have to be reciprocated. The retweet method
enables the users to communicate and share information. The main
goal of this work is to show Twitter as a news media and the relation
between followers and tweets.

2. Twitter
2.1 What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?
Twitter is a microblogging service of about six years old, and has
more than 41 million users as at July 2009. And it has come up with
the identification of new happenings. One of the events that made
Twitter very popular was the case of USA airways jet that crashed
into the Hudson River. And the first photograph of the accident
actually appeared on twitter before any news media got there.
Basically, the users in twitter follow others or are being followed.
Unlike other social networks sites, it does not necessary to be
reciprocated. In Twitter, as a follower the user gets all the messages
“known as tweet” from those the user follows. RT stands for
retweet, '@' followed by a user identifier address the user, and ‘#’
followed by a word represents a hashtag. The well defined markup
vocabulary combined with a short message, 140 character limit per
message. And so you read other people's tweets. The retweet
method enables users to spread and share information of their
choice beyond the reach of the original tweet’s followers. Several
recent studies examined Twitter from different perspectives, in
addition of the topological characteristics of Twitter, tweet as social
sensors of-real time events.

2.2 TWITTER SPACE CRAWL:

Since Twitter provides an Application Programming Interface (API) it

makes it easier to creep and collect data.

2.3 Twitter User profile:

In twitter, the users keep profile about themselves. And there is
open profile which contains the full name, the location, a web page,
a brief life history, and the user number of tweets. The people who
follow the user and those that the user follows are also listed.
Twitter rate-limits 20,000 requests per hour.

3. Trending Topics:
In Twitter, phrases, words and hashtags are trailed which are often
stated and are beneath the title of “trending topics”. Hashtags are
words, phrases prefixed with symbol ‘#’ character. Basically, it is top
10, and top 20 words that appear in all the tweets that twitter
receives. Trending topics are not grouped in Twitter. For example
during the death of Michael Jackson nearly all the 10 trending topics
were about him.

3.1 Users Participation in Trending Topics:

Out of the total number of 41million Twitter users, a large number of
users (8; 262; 545) take part in trending topics, and about 15% of
those users take part in more than 10 topics during four months.
Figure 1: Cumulative numbers of tweets and users over time

In the Diagram above, both the “apple” and “#Iranelection” have

related numbers of tweets, but the number of user taking part in
‘apple’ is five times larger than that of ‘#iranelection’. However, it
was gather that the rate the new users write on the topic
’#iranelection’ reduce after 20 days.
http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs315/Papers/What is twitter-a social net or news media.pdf

4. Tweets:
Tweets are brief messages from a user to its followers. Tweets are
simply similar to blog posts. The unique thing about tweet is that it is
restricted to 140 characters, and much shorter than blog posts. Due
to the brief allowance on the amount of tweet, it means that the
user have to simply use phrase abbreviation. The good thing is that
the abbreviation is well known, and which is astonishingly reliable
across user groups and also to other electronic processes such as
chat room and SMS. Twitter has its own particular abbreviation such
as “RT” for retweet which simply means that previous tweet was
sent once more by the user, and “DM” means direct message and it
is from one user to another. Twitter as a medium of broadcast, the
general audience are being directed to with Tweets, but there are
special provisions by which a user can direct a tweet at another user,
or send it as a response to an earlier tweet. This is frequently made
by appending a “@” the symbol to the intended user name and
including this keyword towards the beginning of the tweet. Another
eccentricity of tweets is that at times they have words prefixed by
(hash symbols), which are also known as hashtags. As a result of
adding a hashtag in a tweet, the user begin the tweet by signifying
that the word designated by the hashtag creates for a fine candidate
as a seek key for the tweet. For example, the tweets concerning the
2009 Iranian elections classically contain the hashtag “\#Iranian
Election". This is probably the reason that tweets often times contain
URL link which either directs the reader to a news article, a blog post,
or in many cases interesting artefacts such as related websites,
videos, photographs, etc. Since URL strings can be much longer than
140 characters, tweets usually make use of forwarding services that
shorten these links to under 10 (20 characters in length).
http://nsl.cse.unt.edu/~enkh/classes/csce6350/Media/twitterStandNewsInTweets.pdf

4.1 Followers’ versus Tweets:

According to source, In order to estimate the relationship between
the number of followers and that of written tweets, the number of
tweets (y) was plot against the number of followers a user has (x).
The popular users who have lesser than 10 followers certainly not
tweeted, and the number of average of tweets against the number
of followers per user is always above the median, this simply means
there are falters who tweet further than expected from the number
of followers. The median number of tweets stays relatively flat in x =
100 to 1; 000, and grows by an order of magnitude for x > 5; 000.
Figure 2: The number of followers and that of tweets per user
http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs315/Papers/What is twitter-a social net or news media.pdf

4.2 Twitter Services:

Twitter provides many services, it creates the required infrastructure
to make sure that tweets which are written by users are transmitted
to all the User’s followers and that tweets from the user's friends are
conveyed to the user in a well-timed method. This flow of tweets is
accessible to the user through numerous different sources, comprise
of the major Twitter website as well as numerous other websites
constructed around Twitter. Tweets are also accessible through the
twitter API service in Extensible Markup Language (XML) and
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) formats. Twitter also bring out
differently-sized examples of the whole set of tweets produced by all
Twitter users through three public feeds, known as open timeline,
spritzer, and GardenHose. These tweets are of different and
increasing amount, while the public timeline and spritzer feeds are
small, with a distinction of numerous orders of magnitude. On the
other hand, the GardenHose feed gives a limited set of approved
Twitter users with entrance to a much larger flow of tweets, while it
is impossible to determine what percentage of tweets to form, but it
is still a very small percentage of all the tweets created by all the
users of Twitter.
 Figure 3: System architecture of TwitterStand.
http://nsl.cse.unt.edu/~enkh/classes/csce6350/Media/twitterStandNewsInTweets.pdf

5. Growth of Twitter:
As Twitter Creates a chronological user and post identifiers, the
growth rate of users can be estimated. The first diagram below
explained the users growth rate and while the second diagram
examined the growth rate of post in the set. In each day the highest
value for the user identifier and post identifier is created by the
twitter API. By examining the change in these rates, it is almost
possible to estimate the growth rate of Twitter.
Figure 4

Figure 5
http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf
Twitter Ranking Users:

Top 20 users ranked by the number of followers, Page Rank in the follower network, and the number of retweets
Figure 6

The top 20 rankers are listed in the table above. They are either
celebrities or news media (Politicians, actors, musicians, show host,
and sport stars). Though, the influence of user does not reflect on
the number of followers alone if the user’s tweet is retweeted many
times or is simply followed by other influential people.

5.1 PageRank:
In this network a node maps to users, and every directed edge maps
to a user following another. This top 20 list has the same users as List
#1 except for Perez Hilton and Stephen Fry. Al Gore and The Onion
are dropped from List #1 and some have changed ranks. Users are
ranked similarly by the number of followers and PageRank.
Comparison amongst Ranking:

Figure 7
http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs315/Papers/What is twitter-a social net or news media.pdf

6. Geographical Distribution:
Twitter gives restricted information such as bio, name, location and
time zone. According to survey, out of 76k users collected, about 39k
had specified locations that could be parsed genuinely and resolved
to their particular latitude and longitude. The country which Twitter
is mostly popular is USA, Europe and Asia. And the users are
relatively high in these cities, New York, San Francisco and Tokyo.
Figure 8
http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs315/Papers/What is twitter-a social net or news media.pdf

7. Impact of Retweets:
Retweet successfully means to convey the information to other
users. It also means to forward a tweet to your followers.

7.1 Audience Size of Retweet:

As People pledge to different forms of mass media such as
Television, Radio and Newspaper, they are known as immediate
Consumers of the news produced by the established media. People
acquire information not always directly from whom they follow, but
through retweets. It could be noted that the power of retweet has
made it possible for users to spread and share information widely.
And also each user has the right to communicate which information
should be spread in form of retweets, that are jointly decides with
the significance of the original.
Figure 9
http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs315/Papers/What is twitter-a social net or news media.pdf

7.2 Retweet Tree:

Since we know that retweet delivers information as far to people of
the original instant followers, then it is good to know how far and
deep retweets travel in Twitter. All retweet trees are sub-graph of
the Twitter network. The diagram below shows the retweet trees
topic ‘air France Flight’. In all the attached parts different colours
signify various tweets. The forest of retweet trees has a large
number of one or two-hop chains.
Figure 10
Retweet trees of ‘air france flight’ tweets.

http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs315/Papers/What is twitter-a social net or news media.pdf

8. Conclusion:
To a large extent, this document has shown that Twitter is more of
news media than social networks. Twitter posts were considered
more valuable than other media for connecting information to
personal goals. Due to the low reciprocity distinguish Twitter from
other social networks.

9. Bibliography:
 http://cs.wellesley.edu/~cs315/Papers/What is twitter-a social net or news media.pdf

 http://nsl.cse.unt.edu/~enkh/classes/csce6350/Media/twitterStandNewsInTweets.pdf

 http://aisl.umbc.edu/resources/369.pdf