Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities

ABSTRACT

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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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Law, social and behavioral sciences

    • Economics

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Retrieval tasks and goals

      • Document filtering

      • Information extraction