Drawing Twitter Social Graphs

Saturday, February 21. 2009

Drawing Twitter Social Graphs

A number of clever people have written systems to derive Twitter social graphs:

There is this one:

Bernardo Huberman, Daniel Romero and Fang Wu of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and Cornell University analyzed the data of 309,740 Twitter users.

Their sample showed that Twitterers in their data set averaged 255 posts, 85 followers and followed 80 users. They also found that a quarter of all posts are directed to another user with an “@” reply. Users who received more attention from followers were also more likely to post more often than users who received little attention in terms of followers.

At left, all links are declared “followees,” and the red links are actual friends. At right, after removing the black links and reorganizing, the network looks simpler than before.

But what they were really interested in was the idea of how Twitter users interacted with each other as “friends.” Consistent with behavior on social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, Twitter users interact with a small number of friends compared with the total number of friends and followers declared.

Social Graphs of Twitter Interactions

And then there is this too from Mat Morrisson:

Using nothing more than their public twitter relationships, is it possible to predict whether a US Congressperson is a Republican or a Democrat? The answer seems to be a guarded “yes” — our tools predict correctly 40/46 times (or around 87% of the cases.)

Calculated Party Affinity US Congress

This post follows on from a post earlier today in which I asked, “can we calculate party affiliation?” The data set in the earlier post was gathered from the 16 members of the UK parliament who are on Twitter and the relationships between them.

Tweetcongress maintains a list of US congresspeople on Twitter. Today (February 13, 2009) there are 76 congresspeople on the service, but when I collected my data set of “who follows who” on February 3, 2009 there were only 65. Of these 65, fully 19 (29%) lived a life of noble isolation with regards the network — none of their peers linked to them, and they in turn linked to none of their peers. Removing these Miss Havishams from the data set leaves me with 46 twittering congresspeople who form a network.

Now as both social network analysis and Aesop would have it, “a man is known by the company he keeps.” What I mean by this is that given the partisan nature of politics, we should expect that Democrats will link to other Democrat twitterers more often than they link to Republican twitterers and vice versa. So that’s what NetDraw , the software I’m using for most of this stuff, looks for, or more accurately:

It is very interesting what you can see from people's interactions on social network...and very worrying, as the inferred deductions you can make from the visible electronic footprints are quite revealing. Up till now its been mainly the property of the Social Nets themselves (and the Apps providers for eg on Facebook's platform), but Twitter with its open APIS makes it far more discernable.

Posted by Alan Patrick in Social Networks at 01:04 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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Interesting article. More proof that Twitter (like any social network) works best when content is directed to specific users and replationships are properly built and maintained. They always said you could tell alot about someone by looking at thier friends didn't they?

#1 Social Networking North (Homepage) on 2009-02-21 11:09 (Reply)

Alan -- I suppose you're right. The exposure of one's social graph /is/ both interesting and worrying.

I've tended to focus on the "interesting" part, I suppose -- I tend to see all this publicly-available information as a huge and free experimental data-set.

I'd like to point out that my interest is wholly without malice (or indeed self-interest), but I think that all academics or marketing people would say that, wouldn't they?

I suppose in the old days when someone like me wouldn't have this kind of access, only government security and intelligence agencies would really have been doing these kinds of thing.

Do you think I'm really likely to run up against ethical issues? Or are you simply reinforcing the fact that the information genie is out of the bottle?

#2 Mat Morrison (Homepage) on 2009-02-21 16:50 (Reply)

@Mat

Like you I'm both fascinated and concerned, the sense of this post is that the genie is indeed out the bottle, for good and ill. Overall I think its probably better that is available to all rather than just to the few.

#3 alan p on 2009-02-21 17:39 (Reply)

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