Abstract

Web 2.0 has brought about several new applications that have enabled arbitrary subsets of users to communicate with each other on a social basis. Such communication increasingly happens not just on Facebook and MySpace but on several smaller network applications such as Twitter and Dodgeball. We present a detailed characterization of Twitter, an application that allows users to send short messages. We gathered three datasets (covering nearly 100,000 users) including constrained crawls of the Twitter network using two different methodologies, and a sampled collection from the publicly available timeline. We identify distinct classes of Twitter users and their behaviors, geographic growth patterns and current size of the network, and compare crawl results obtained under rate limiting constraints.

Keywords

TimelineComputer scienceLimitingSocial mediaSocial network (sociolinguistics)World Wide WebData scienceGeography

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Publication Info

Year
2008
Type
article
Pages
19-24
Citations
711
Access
Closed

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Balachander Krishnamurthy, Phillipa Gill, Martin Arlitt (2008). A few chirps about twitter. , 19-24. https://doi.org/10.1145/1397735.1397741

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DOI
10.1145/1397735.1397741