Overview
Twitter is an online social network service (SNS) where users can "follow" any other user of interest to receive his or her mini-blogs which are called "tweets". Two unique features distinguish Twitter from other SNS: (I)The absence of mutual consent in establishing follow links; and (II) Being a mixture of news media and social network. Amid this Twitter social fog, an interesting question is that how much of this Twitter network reflects one’s real-life social network. In this work, we study the problem of identifying a user’s off-line real-life social community, which we call the user's core community, purely from examining Twitter follow network structure. Based on three principles we propose to characterize real-life friendship, we develop a novel algorithm to iteratively discover the core community based on a new way of measuring user closeness. Our results have been manually evaluated by real Twitter users which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with both high precision and recall in most cases. We also show an applications of using the core community to obtain more robust and accurate user interest profile.
Core Community Discovery
Case Study
Members
Dataset
Twitter data
Publication
"When a Friend In Twitter is a Friend In Life"
Wei Xie, Cheng Li, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim, Xueqing Gong Proc. of the 4th ACM Int. Conf. on Web Science (WebSci' 12), Chicago, Illinois, USA, July, 2012.
Pinnacle Lab