Twitter and Your So-Called Social “Network”

HP Laboratories published some research back in January 2009 on revealing actual interactions among people of massive online social networks. The example of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver its usage and exploding growth is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero, and Fang Wu wrote a paper for HP Laboratories back in January 2009 about the “real” underlying networks of Twitter and its ingenious one-click four-state friend and follower principle.

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 rhythms 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.

For me I had two main takeaways from this paper.

The number of total posts eventually saturates as a function of the number of followers. This implies that users with a large number of followers are not necessarily those with very large number of total posts. Maybe this has to do with the attention level and time a Twitterer can spend on Twitter besides his/her day job ;)

Reciprocity plays an important role in many economic and social interactions. At the same time, the plenitude of signals that people are flooded with makes attention a scarce commodity and thus a valued private good. Subsequently, reciprocity of attention plays an important role in defining the “hidden network”, and can be used to reveal and identify actual influencers with Twitter networks:

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Twitter Under The Microscope: Huberman, Romero and Wu (stoweboyd.com)

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