Procedings of the Joint 9th WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop 2007

Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities

Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finin, and Belle Tseng

August 12, 2007

Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed 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 phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging 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.

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Tags: blog, microblog, social media, twitter, user intention

Type: InProceedings

Publisher: Springer

Note: DOI: 10.1145/1348549.1348556

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Google Scholar Citations: 342 citations