Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging
Usage and Communities
Akshay Java
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250, USA
aks1@cs.umbc.edu
Xiaodan Song
NEC Laboratories America
10080 N. Wolfe Road, SW3-350
Cupertino, CA 95014, USA
xiaodan@sv.nec-labs.com
Tim Finin
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250, USA
finin@cs.umbc.edu
Belle Tseng
NEC Laboratories America
10080 N. Wolfe Road, SW3-350
Cupertino, CA 95014, USA
belle@sv.nec-labs.com
ABSTRACT
Microblogging is a new form of communication in which
users can describe their current status in short posts dis-
tributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the
Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot
of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper,
we present our observations of the microblogging phenom-
ena by studying the topological and geographical properties
of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use mi-
croblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek
or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions
associated at a community level and show how users with
similar intentions connect with each other.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: Information
Search and Retrieval - Information Filtering; J.4 [Computer
Applications]: Social and Behavioral Sciences - Economics
General Terms
Social Network Analysis, User Intent, Microblogging, Social
Media
1. INTRODUCTION
Microblogging is a relatively new phenomenon defined as “a
form of blogging that lets you write brief text updates (usu-
ally less than 200 characters) about your life on the go and
send them to friends and interested observers via text mes-
saging, instant messaging (IM), email or the web.” 1.Itis
1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-blogging
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provided by several services including Twitter2,Jaiku
3and
more recently Pownce4. These tools provide a light-weight,
easy form of communication that enables users to broadcast
and share information about their activities, opinions and
status. One of the popular microblogging platforms is Twit-
ter [29]. According to ComScore, within eight months of its
launch, Twitter had about 94,000 users as of April, 2007 [9].
Figure 1 shows a snapshot of the first author’s Twitter home-
page. Updates or posts are made by succinctly describing
one’s current status within a limit of 140 characters. Top-
ics range from daily life to current events, news stories, and
other interests. IM tools including Gtalk, Yahoo and MSN
have features that allow users to share their current status
with friends on their buddy lists. Microblogging tools facili-
tate easily sharing status messages either publicly or within
asocialnetwork.
Figure 1: An example Twitter homepage with up-
dates talking about daily experiences and personal
interests.
2http://www.twitter.com
3http://www.jaiku.com
4http://www.pownce.com
Compared to regular blogging, microblogging fulfills a need
for an even faster mode of communication. By encourag-
ing shorter posts, it lowers users’ requirement of time and
thought investment for content generation. This is also one
of its main differentiating factors from blogging in general.
The second important difference is the frequency of update.
On average, a prolific bloger may update her blog once ev-
ery few days; on the other hand a microblogger may post
several updates in a single day.
With the recent popularity of Twitter and similar microblog-
ging systems, it is important to understand why and how
people use these tools. Understanding this will help us
evolve the microblogging idea and improve both microblog-
ging client and infrastructure software. We tackle this prob-
lem by studying the microblogging phenomena and analyz-
ing different types of user intentions in such systems.
Much of research in user intention detection has focused on
understanding the intent of a search queries. According to
Broder [5], the three main categories of search queries are
navigational, informational and transactional. Understand-
ing the intention for a search query is very different from
user intention for content creation. In a survey of bloggers,
Nardi et al. [26] describe different motivations for “why
we blog”. Their findings indicate that blogs are used as a
tool to share daily experiences, opinions and commentary.
Based on their interviews, they also describe how bloggers
form communities online that may support different social
groups in real world. Lento et al. [21] examined the im-
portance of social relationship in determining if users would
remain active in a blogging tool called Wallop. A user’s re-
tention and interest in blogging could be predicted by the
comments received and continued relationship with other
active members of the community. Users who are invited by
people with whom they share pre-exiting social relationships
tend to stay longer and active in the network. Moreover, cer-
tain communities were found to have a greater retention rate
due to existence of such relationships. Mutual awareness in
a social network has been found effective in discovering com-
munities [23].
In computational linguists, researchers have studied the prob-
lem of recognizing the communicative intentions that un-
derlie utterances in dialog systems and spoken language in-
terfaces. The foundations of this work go back to Austin
[2], Stawson [32] and Grice [14]. Grosz [15] and Allen [1]
carried out classic studies in analyzing the dialogues be-
tween people and between people and computers in coopera-
tive task oriented environments. More recently, Matsubara
[24] has applied intention recognition to improve the per-
formance of automobile-based spoken dialog system. While
their work focusses on the analysis of ongoing dialogs be-
tween two agents in a fairly well defined domain, studying
user intention in Web-based systems requires looking at both
the content and link structure.
In this paper, we describe how users have adopted a spe-
cific microblogging platform, Twitter. Microblogging is rel-
atively nascent, and to the best of our knowledge, no large
scale studies have been done on this form of communication
and information sharing. We study the topological and geo-
graphical structure of Twitter’s social network and attempt
to understand the user intentions and community structure
in microblogging. From our analysis, we find that the main
types of user intentions are: daily chatter, conversations,
sharing information and reporting news. Furthermore, users
play different roles of information source, friends or informa-
tion seeker in different communities.
The paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, we describe
the dataset and some of the properties of the underlying
social network of Twitter users. Section 3 provides an anal-
ysis of Twitter’s social network and its spread across geogra-
phies. Next, in Section 4 we describe aggregate user behav-
ior and community level user intentions. Section 5 provides
a taxonomy of user intentions. Finally, we summarize our
findings and conclude with Section 6.
2. DATASET DESCRIPTION
Twitter is currently one of the most popular microblogging
platforms. Users interact with this system by either using a
Web interface, IM agent or sending SMS updates. Members
may choose to make their updates public or available only to
friends. If user’s profile is made public, her updates appear
in a “public timeline” of recent updates. The dataset used
in this study was created by monitoring this public timeline
for a period of two months starting from April 01, 2007 to
May 30, 2007. A set of recent updates were fetched once
every 30 seconds. There are a total of 1,348,543 posts from
76,177 distinct users in this collection.
Twitter allows a user, A, to “follow” updates from other
members who are added as “friends”. An individual who is
not a friend of user A but “follows” her updates is known as
a “follower”. Thus friendships can either be reciprocated or
one-way. By using the Twitter developer API5, we fetched
the social network of all users. We construct a directed
graph G(V, E), where Vrepresents a set of users and E
represents the set of “friend” relations. A directed edge e
exists between two users uand vif user udeclares vas
a friend. There are a total of 87,897 distinct nodes with
829,053 friend relation between them. There are more nodes
in this graph due to the fact that some users discovered
though the link structure do not have any posts during the
duration in which the data was collected. For each user, we
also obtained their profile information and mapped their
location to a geographic coordinate, details of which are
provided in the following section.
3. MICROBLOGGING IN TWITTER
This section describes some of the characteristic properties
of Twitter’s Social Network including it’s network topology
and geographical distribution.
3.1 Growth of Twitter
Since Twitter provides a sequential user and post identifier,
we can estimate the growth rate of Twitter. Figure 2 shows
the growth rate for users and Figure 3 shows the growth rate
for posts in this collection. Since, we do not have access to
historical data, we can only observe its growth for a two
month time period. For each day we identify the maximum
value for the user identifier and post identifier as provided
5http://twitter.com/help/api
3000000
3500000
4000000
4500000
5000000
5500000
6000000
6500000
11-May5-May29-Apr21-Apr14-Apr7-Apr1-Apr
Max UserID
April - May 2007
Twitter Growth Rate (Users)
Growth of Users
Figure 2: Twitter User Growth Rate. Figure shows
the maximum userid observed for each day in the
dataset. After an initial period of interest around
March 2007, the rate at which new users are joining
Twitter has slowed.
by the Twitter API. By observing the change in these val-
ues, we can roughly estimate the growth of Twitter. It is
interesting to note that even though Twitter launched in
2006, it really became popular soon after it won the South
by SouthWest (SXSW) conference Web Awards6in March,
2007. Figure 2 shows the initial growth in users as a result
of interest and publicity that Twitter generated at this con-
ference. After this period, the rate at which new users are
joining the network has slowed. Despite the slow down, the
number of new posts is constantly growing, approximately
doubling every month indicating a steady base of users gen-
erating content.
Following Kolari et al. [18], we use the following definition
of user activity and retention:
Definition A user is considered active during a week if he
or she has posted at least one post during that week.
Definition An active user is considered retained for the
given week, if he or she reposts at least once in the following
X weeks.
Due to the short time period for which the data is available
and the nature of Microblogging we decided to use X as a
period of one week. Figure 4 shows the user activity and
retention for the duration of the data. About half of the
users are active and of these half of them repost in the fol-
lowing week. There is a lower activity recorded during the
last week of the data due to the fact that updates from the
public timeline are not available for two days during this
period.
3.2 Network Properties
The Web, blogosphere, online social networks and human
contact networks all belong to a class of “scale-free net-
works” [3] and exhibit a “small world phenomenon” [33]. It
6http://2007.sxsw.com/
15000000
20000000
25000000
30000000
35000000
40000000
45000000
50000000
55000000
60000000
65000000
70000000
11-May5-May29-Apr21-Apr14-Apr7-Apr1-Apr
Max PostID
April - May 2007
Twitter Growth Rate (Posts)
Growth of Posts
Figure 3: Twitter Posts Growth Rate. Figure shows
the maximum post ID observed for each day in the
dataset. Although the rate at which new users are
joining the network has slowed, the number of posts
are increasing at a steady rate.
has been shown that many properties including the degree
distributions on the Web follow a power law distribution
[19, 6]. Recent studies have confirmed that some of these
properties also hold true for the blogosphere [31].
Property Twitter WWE
Tot a l N o des 87897 143,736
Tot a l L i n k s 829247 707,761
Average Degree 18.86 4.924
Indegree Slope -2.4 -2.38
Outdegree Slope -2.4 NA
Degree correlation 0.59 NA
Diameter 612
Largest WCC size 81769 107,916
Largest SCC size 42900 13,393
Clustering Coefficient 0.106 0.0632
Reciprocity 0.58 0.0329
Table 1: Twitter Social Network Statistics
Table 1 describes some of the properties for Twitter’s social
network. We also compare these properties with the corre-
sponding values for the Weblogging Ecosystems Workshop
(WWE) collection [4] as reported by Shi et al. [31]. Their
study shows a network with high degree correlation (also
shown in Figure 6) and high reciprocity. This implies that
there are a large number of mutual acquaintances in the
graph. New Twitter users often initially join the network
on invitation from friends. Further, new friends are added
to the network by browsing through user profiles and adding
other known acquaintances. High reciprocal links has also
been observed in other online social networks like Livejour-
nal [22]. Personal communication and contact network such
as cell phone call graphs [25] also have high degree corre-
lation. Figure 5 shows the cumulative degree distributions
[27, 8] of Twitter’s network. It is interesting to note that
the slopes γin and γout are both approximately -2.4. This
value for the power law exponent is similar to that found for
User Activity and Retention
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
12345678
Week
Number of Users
Retained Users Active Users
Figure 4: Twitter User Activity and Retention
Continent Number of Users
North America 21064
Europe 7442
Asia 6753
Oceania 910
South America 816
Africa 120
Others 78
Unknown 38994
Table 2: Table shows the geographical distribution
of Twitter users. North America, Europe and Asia
have the highest adoption of Twitter.
the Web (typically -2.1 for indegree [11]) and blogosphere
(-2.38 for the WWE collection).
3.3 Geographical Distribution
Twitter provides limited profile information such as name,
bio, timezone and location. For the 76K users in our collec-
tion about 39K had specified locations that could be parsed
correctly and resolved to their respective latitude and longi-
tudinal coordinates (using Yahoo! Geocoding API7). Fig-
ure 7 and Table 2 shows the geographical distribution of
Twitter users and the number of users in each continent.
Twitter is most popular in US, Europe and Asia (mainly
Japan). Tokyo, New York and San Francisco are the major
cities where user adoption of Twitter is high [16].
Twitter’s popularity is global and the social network of its
users crosses continental boundaries. By mapping each user’s
latitude and longitude to a continent location we can extract
the origin and destination location for every edge. Table 3
shows the distribution of friendship relations across major
continents represented in the dataset. Oceana is used to
represent Australia, New Zealand and other island nations.
A significant portion (about 45%) of the Social Network still
lies within North America. Moreover, there are more intra-
7http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/
100101102103104
10−5
10−4
10−3
10−2
10−1
100
101Indegree Distribution of Twitter Social Network
Indegree K
P(x≥ K)
Indegree
γin = −2.412
(a) Indegree Distribution
100101102103104
10−5
10−4
10−3
10−2
10−1
100
101
102Outdegree Distribution of Twitter Social Network
Outdegree K
P(x≥ K)
Outdegree
γout = −2.412
(b) Outdegree Distribution
Figure 5: Twitter social network has a power law
exponent of about -2.4 which is similar to the Web
and blogosphere.
continent links than across continents. This is consistent
with observations that the probability of friendship between
two users is inversely proportionate to their geographic prox-
imity [22].
In Table 4, we compare some of the network properties
across these three continents with most users: North Amer-
ica, Europe and Asia. For each continent the social network
is extracted by considering only the subgraph where both the
source and destination of the friendship relation belong to
the same continent. Asian and European communities have
a higher degree correlation and reciprocity than their North
American counterparts. Language plays an important role
is such social networks. Many users from Japan and Span-
ish speaking world connect with others who speak the same
language. In general, users in Europe and Asia tend to have
higher reciprocity and clustering coefficient values in their
corresponding subgraphs.
1
10
100
1000
10000
1 10 100 1000 10000
Outdegree (follows)
Indegree (followed by)
Twitter Social Network Scatter Plot
Correlation Coefficient = 0.59
Figure 6: Scatter plot showing the degree correla-
tion of Twitter social network. A high degree corre-
lation signifies that users who are followed by many
people also have large number of friends.
Distribution of Twitter Users Across the World
180° W 135° W 90° W 45° W 0° 45° E 90° E 135° E 180° E
90° S
45° S
0°
45° N
90° N
Figure 7: Figure shows the global distribution of
Twitter users. Though initially launched in US
Twitter is popular across the world.
4. USER INTENTION
In this paper, we propose a two-level framework for user in-
tention detection. First, we used the HITS algorithm [17] to
find the hubs and authorities in the network. Hubs and au-
thorities have a mutually reinforcing property and are com-
puted as follows: H(p) represents the hub value of the page
pandA(p) represents the authority value of a page p.
Authority(p)=
v∈S,v→p
Hub(v)
And
Hub(p)=
u∈S,p→u
Authority(u)
Table 5 shows a listing of top ten hubs and authorities. From
this list, we can see that some users have high authority
score, and also high hub score. For example, Scobleizer, Ja-
sonCalacanis, bloggersblog, and Webtickle who have many
followers and friends in Twitter are located in this category.
Some users with very high authority scores have relatively
low hub score, such as Twitterrific, ev, and springnet. They
have many followers while less friends in Twitter, and thus
are located in this category. Some other users with very
from-to Asia Europe Oceana N.A S.A Africa
Asia 13.45 0.64 0.10 5.97 0.005 0.01
Europe 0.53 9.48 0.25 6.16 0.17 0.02
Oceana 0.13 0.40 0.60 1.92 0.02 0.01
N.A 5.19 5.46 1.23 45.60 0.60 0.10
S.A 0.06 0.26 0.02 0.75 0.62 0.00
Africa 0.01 0.03 0.00 0.11 0.00 0.03
Table 3: Table shows the distribution of Twitter
social network links across continents. Most of the
social network lies within North America. (N.A =
North America, S.A = South America)
Property N.A Europe Asia
Tot a l N o des 16,998 5201 4886
Tot a l E d g e s 205,197 42,664 60519
Average Degree 24.15 16.42 24.77
Degree Correlation 0.62 0.78 0.92
Clustering Coefficient 0.147 0.54 0.18
Percent Reciprocity 62.64 71.62 81.40
Table 4: Network properties of social networks
within a continent. Europe and Asia have a higher
reciprocity indicating closer ties in these social net-
works. (N.A = North America)
high hub scores have relatively low authority scores, such as
dan7, startupmeme, and aidg. They follow many other users
while have less friends instead. Based on this rough cate-
gorization, we can see that user intention can be roughly
categorized into these 3 types: information sharing, infor-
mation seeking, and friendship-wise relationship.
After the hub/authority detection, we identify communi-
ties within friendship-wise relationships by only considering
the bidirectional links where two users regard each other as
friends. A community in a network can be vaguely defined
as a group of nodes more densely connected to each other
than to nodes outside the group. Often communities are
topical or based on shared interests. To construct web com-
munities, Flake et. al. [12] proposed a method using HITS
User Authority User Hub
Scobleizer 0.002354 Webti ckle 0.003655
Twitterrific 0.001765 Scobleizer 0.002338
ev 0.001652 dan7 0.002079
JasonCalacanis 0.001557 startupmeme 0.001906
springnet 0.001525 aidg 0.001734
bloggersblog 0.001506 lisaw 0.001701
chrispirillo 0.001503 bhartzer 0.001599
darthvader 0.001367 bloggersblog 0.001559
ambermacarthur 0.001348 JasonCalacanis 0.001534
Table 5: Top 10 Hubs and Authorities in Twitter.
Some of the top authorities are also popular blog-
gers. Top hubs include users like startupmeme and
aidg which are microblogging versions of a blogs and
other web sites.
and maximize flow/minimize cut to detect communities. In
social network area, Newman and Girvan [13, 7] proposed a
metric called modularity to measure the strength of the com-
munity structure. The intuition is that a good division of a
network into communities is not merely to make the num-
ber of edges running between communities small; rather, the
number of edges between groups is smaller than expected.
Only if the number of between group edges is significantly
lower than what would be expected purely by chance can we
justifiably claim to have found significant community struc-
ture. Based on the modularity measure of the network, op-
timization algorithms are proposed to find good divisions of
a network into communities by optimizing the modularity
over possible divisions. Also, this optimization process can
be related to the eigenvectors of matrices. However, in the
above algorithms, each node has to belong to one commu-
nity, while in real networks, communities often overlap. One
person can serve a totally different functionality in different
communities. In an extreme case, one user can serve as the
information source in one community and the information
seeker in another community.
People in friendship communities often know each other.
Prompted by this intuition, we applied the Clique Perco-
lation Method (CPM) [28, 10] to find overlapping commu-
nities in networks. The CPM is based on the observation
that a typical member in a community is linked to many
other members, but not necessarily to all other nodes in the
same community. In CPM, the k-clique-communities are
identified by looking for the unions of all k-cliques that can
be reached from each other through a series of adjacent k-
cliques, where two k-cliques are said to be adjacent if they
share k-1 nodes. This algorithm is suitable for detecting the
dense communities in the network.
Here we list a few specific examples of how communities form
in Twitter and why users consist of these communities - what
user intentions are in each community. Figure 8 illustrates a
representative community with 58 users closely communicat-
ing with each other through Twitter service. The key terms
they talk about include work, Xbox, game, and play. It
looks like some users with gaming interests getting together
to discuss the information about certain new products on
this topic or sharing gaming experience. When we go to
specific users website, we also find this type of conversation:
“BDazzler@Steve519 I don’t know about the Jap PS3’s. I
think they have region encoding, so you’d only be able to play
Jap games. Euro has no ps2 chip” or “BobbyBlackwolf Play-
ing with the PS3 firmware update, can’t get WMP11 to share
MP4’s and the PS3 won’t play WMV’s or AVI’s...Fail.” We
also noticed that users in this community also share with
each other their personal feeling and daily life experiences
in addition to comments on “gaming”. Based on our study
of the communities in Twitter dataset, we observed that this
is a representative community in Twitter network: people
in one community have certain common interests and they
also share with each other about their personal feeling and
daily experience.
Using CPM, we are able to find how communities connected
to each other by overlapped components. Figure 9 illustrates
two communities with podcasting interests where GSPN and
pcamarata are the ones who connected these two communi-
ties. In GSPN’s bio, he mentioned he is the Producer of the
Generally Speaking Podcast Network8; while in pcamarata’s
bio, he mentioned he is a family man, a neurosurgeon, and
a a podcaster. By looking at the top key terms of these two
communities, we can see that the focus of the green com-
munity is a little more diversified: people occasionally talk
about podcasting, while the topic of the red community is
a little more focused. In a sense, the red community is like
a professional community of podcasting while the green one
is a informal community about podcasting.
Figure 10 illustrates five communities connected by Scobleizer,
who is a Tech geek blogger. People follow his posts to
get technology news. People in different communities share
different interests with Scobleizer. Specifically, AndruEd-
wards, Scobleizer, daryn, and davidgeller get together to
share video related news. CaptSolo et al. have some inter-
ests on Semantic Web. AdoMatic et al. are engineers and
have interests with coding related issues.
Studying intentions at a community level, we observe users
participate in communities which share similar interests. In-
dividuals may have different intentions for joining these com-
munities. While some act as information providers, oth-
ers are merely looking for new and interesting information.
Next, we analyze aggregate trends across users spread over
many communities, we can identify certain distinct themes.
Often there are recurring patterns in word usages. Such
patterns may be observed over a day or a week. For exam-
ple Figure 11 shows the trends for the terms “friends” and
“school” in the entire corpus. While school is of interest
during weekdays, friends take over on the weekends. The
Figure 11: Daily Trends for terms “school” and
“friends”. The term school is more frequent during
the early week, friends take over during the week-
end.
log-likelihood ratio is used to determine terms that are of
significant importance for a given day of the week. Using a
technique described by Rayson and Garside [30], we create
a contingency table of term frequencies for a given day and
the rest of the week.
8http://ravenscraft.org/gspn/home
Key Terms
just:273 com:225
work:185 like:172
good:168 going:157
got:152 time:142
live:136 new:133
xbox:125 tinyurl:122
today:121 game:115
playing:115 twitter:109
day:108 lol:10
play:100 halo:100
night:90 home:89
getting:88 need:86
think:85 gamerandy:85
ll:85 360:84
watching:79 want:78
know:77
Figure 8: An example of a “gaming” community who also share daily experiences.
Day Rest of the Week Tot a l
Fre q o f word a b a+b
Freq of other words c-a d-b c+d-a-b
Tot a l c d c+d
Comparing the terms that occur on a given day with the
histogram of terms for the rest of the week, we find the most
descriptive terms. The log-likelihood score is calculated as
follows:
LL =2∗(a∗log(a
E1)+b∗log(b
E2))
where E1=c∗a+b
c+dand E2=d∗a+b
c+d
Figure 12 shows the most descriptive terms for each day
of the week. Some of the extracted terms correspond to
recurring events and activities significant for a particular
day of the week for example “school” or “party”. Other
terms are related to current events like “easter” and “EMI”.
5. DISCUSSION
Following section presents a brief taxonomy of user inten-
tions on Twitter. The apparent intention of a Twitter post
was determined manually by the first author. Each post
was read and categorized. Posts that were highly ambigu-
ous or for which the author could not make a judgement were
placed in the category UNKNOWN. Based on this analysis
we have found following are some of the main user intentions
on Twitter:
•Daily Chatter Most posts on Twitter talk about daily
routine or what people are currently doing. This is the
largest and most common user of Twitter
•Conversations In Twitter, since there is no direct way
for people to comment or reply to their friend’s posts,
early adopters started using the @ symbol followed by
a username for replies. About one eighth of all posts
in the collection contain a conversation and this form
of communication was used by almost 21% of users in
the collection.
Key Terms
going:222 just:218
work:170 night:143
bed:140 time:139
good:137 com:130
lost:124 day:122
home:112
listening:111 today:100
new:98 got:97
gspn:92
watching:92 kids:88
morning:81 twitter:79
getting:77 tinyurl:75
lunch:74 like:72
podcast:72 watch:71
ready:70 tv:69
need:64 live:61
tonight:61 trying:58
love:58 cliff:58
dinner:56
Key Terms
just:312 com:180
work:180 time:149
listening:147 home:145
going:139 day:134
got:126 today:124
good:116 bed:114
night:112 tinyurl:97
getting:88 podcast:87
dinner:85 watching:83
like:78 mass:78
lunch:72 new:72
ll:70 tomorrow:69
ready:64 twitter:62
working:61 tonight:61
morning:58 need:58
great:58 finished:55
tv:54
Figure 9: Example of how two communities connect to each other
•Sharing information/URLs About 13% of all the posts
in the collection contain some URL in them. Due to
the small character limit a URL shortening service like
TinyURL9is frequently used to make this feature fea-
sible.
•Reportin g new s Many users report latest news or com-
ment about current events on Twitter. Some auto-
mated users or agents post updates like weather re-
ports and new stories from RSS feeds. This is an in-
teresting application of Twitter that has evolved due
to easy access to the developer API.
Using the link structure, following are the main categories
of users on Twitter:
•Information Source An information source is also a
hub and has a large number of followers. This user
may post updates on regular intervals or infrequently.
9http://www.tinyurl.com
Despite infrequent updates, certain users have a large
number of followers due to the valuable nature of their
updates. Some of the information sources were also
found to be automated tools posting news and other
useful information on Twitter.
•Fri e n d s Most relationships fall into this broad cate-
gory. There are many sub-categories of friendships
on Twitter. For example a user may have friends,
family and co-workers on their friend or follower lists.
Sometimes unfamiliar users may also add someone as
a friend.
•Information Seeker An information seeker is a person
who might post rarely, but follows other users regu-
larly.
Our study has revealed different motivations and utilities
of microblogging platforms. A single user may have multi-
ple intentions or may even serve different roles in different
communities. For example, there may be posts meant to
com:175 twitter:134
just:133 like:86
good:82 tinyurl:75
time:74 new:74
jasona:73 going:68
day:63 don:61
work:58 think:56
ll:54 scottw:54
today:52 hkarthik:50
nice:49 getting:47
got:47 really:46
yeah:44 need:43
watching:41 love:41
night:40 home:40
com:93 twitter:74
just:35 new:32
tinyurl:29 going:24
ll:22 blog:21
jaiku:21 don:21
leo:21 flickr:21
like:19 video:18
google:18 today:18
feeds:18 getting:16
yeah:16 good:15
people:15
com:93 twitter:76 tinyurl:34
just:32 new:28 video:26
going:24 ll:22 jaiku:22
blog:21 leo:21 like:19
don:19 gamerandy:19 yeah:18
google:17 live:16 people:16
got:16 know:15 time:15
com:121 twitter:76 just:50
ustream:43 tv:42 live:42
today:39 hawaii:36 day:33
new:33 time:33 good:33
video:32 leo:30 work:30
like:28 watching:28 tinyurl:28
com:198 twitter:132 just:109
tinyurl:87 going:59 blog:56
like:55 good:51 new:50
url:50 day:49 people:46
time:45 today:45 google:42
don:41 think:40 night:38
ll:38 need:35 got:33
ireland:33 great:31 looking:29
work:29 thanks:28 video:26
Figure 10: Example Communities in Twitter Social Network. Key terms indicate that these communities
are talking mostly about technology. The user Scobliezer connects multiple communities in the network.
update your personal network on a holiday plan or a post
to share an interesting link with co-workers. Multiple user
intentions have led to some users feeling overwhelmed by
microblogging services [20]. Based on our analysis of user
intentions, we believe that the ability to categorize friends
into groups (e.g. family, co-workers) would greatly benefit
the adoption of microblogging platforms. In addition fea-
tures that could help facilitate conversations and sharing
news would be beneficial.
6. CONCLUSION
In this study we have analyzed a large social network in a
new form of social media known as microblogging. Such net-
works were found to have a high degree correlation and reci-
procity, indicating close mutual acquaintances among users.
While determining an individual user’s intention in using
such applications is challenging, by analyzing the aggregate
behavior across communities of users, we can describe the
community intention. Understanding these intentions and
learning how and why people use such tools can be helpful
in improving them and adding new features that would re-
tain more users. In this work, we have identified different
types of user intentions and studied the community struc-
tures. Currently, we are working on automated approaches
of detecting user intentions with related community struc-
tures.
7. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Twitter Inc. for providing an API
to their service and Pranam Kolari, Xiaolin Shi and Amit
Karandikar for their suggestions.
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