Twitter Under The Microscope: Huberman, Romero and Wu

An investigation into the behavior of Twitter users leads to a major conclusion: the apparent, superficial social network based on following and followers conceals a deeper, sparser social network, where relationship really matters.

[from Social Networks That Matter: Twitter Under The Microscope by Bernardo Huberman, Daniel Romero, and Fang Wu]

Many people, including scholars, advertisers and political activists, see online social networks as an opportunity to study the propagation of ideas, the formation of social bonds and viral marketing, among others. This view should be tempered by our findings that a link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. As we showed in the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus the need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.

Palimpsest, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The appearance of connection is deceiving: a palimpsest, where the deep structure of true relationship, the signal concealed, has to be teased out of the noise of the surface network.