Measuring Message Propagation and Social Influence on Twitter.com

Although extensive studies have been conducted on online social networks (OSNs), it is not clear how to characterize information propagation and social influence, two types of important but not well defined social behavior. This paper presents a measurement study of 58M messages collected from 700K users on Twitter.com, a popular social medium. We analyze the propagation patterns of general messages and show how breaking news (Michael Jackson's death) spread through Twitter. Furthermore, we evaluate different social influences by examining their stabilities, assessments, and correlations. This paper addresses the complications as well as challenges we encounter when measuring message propagation and social influence on OSNs. We believe that our results here provide valuable insights for future OSN research.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SOCINFO
• Authors: Shaozhi Ye, Shyhtsun Felix Wu
• Keywords: Online Social Networks, Popular Social Medium, Social Influence, Social Networks, SOCINFO 2010