Complex Networks
Following and Followers in Twitter
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows its users to post short messages (aka Tweets) to be displayed on their profile pages. Asocial network is also embedded in Twitter: users can receive messages fromusers they follow. In the Twitter terminology, there are following andfollowers. Given a user A, his followers are the users who receive hismessages, and his followings the users he receives messages from (similar toRSS feeds subscription). Note that the following/followers relation is notsymmetric: if user A decides to follow user B, B does not automaticallyfollow A back.
The data set used to make this plot was collected in June 2009 using ourown Twitter exploration tools as well as the streamingAPI. It contains information about 1 427 116 Twitter accounts. The plotrepresents the correlation between the number of following and the number offollowers. For a given following/follower value, the color describes thenumber of accounts that have this value. For example, we collected informationabout 10 accounts with 10 followings and 10 followers.
An interesting result can be seen for small followings and followersvalues: 67 % of users have followings and followers values strictly below 100.Among these users, we can clearly see the common likelihood to have the samenumber of followings and followers.
Finally, we can clearly identify the well-known following/followersratio that forbids a user to have more than 2000 followings if it has lessthan 2000 followers (that's the horizontal part of the red line). From thispreliminary investigation, it seems that after 2000 followings, thefollowings/followers ratio linearly grows with the number of followings(that's the growing part of the red line); this fact was not known before thestudy, and it is still not advertised by Twitter.
Following and Followers in Twitter
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows its users to post short messages (aka Tweets) to be displayed on their profile pages. Asocial network is also embedded in Twitter: users can receive messages fromusers they follow. In the Twitter terminology, there are following andfollowers. Given a user A, his followers are the users who receive hismessages, and his followings the users he receives messages from (similar toRSS feeds subscription). Note that the following/followers relation is notsymmetric: if user A decides to follow user B, B does not automaticallyfollow A back.
The data set used to make this plot was collected in June 2009 using ourown Twitter exploration tools as well as the streamingAPI. It contains information about 1 427 116 Twitter accounts. The plotrepresents the correlation between the number of following and the number offollowers. For a given following/follower value, the color describes thenumber of accounts that have this value. For example, we collected informationabout 10 accounts with 10 followings and 10 followers.
An interesting result can be seen for small followings and followersvalues: 67 % of users have followings and followers values strictly below 100.Among these users, we can clearly see the common likelihood to have the samenumber of followings and followers.
Finally, we can clearly identify the well-known following/followersratio that forbids a user to have more than 2000 followings if it has lessthan 2000 followers (that's the horizontal part of the red line). From thispreliminary investigation, it seems that after 2000 followings, thefollowings/followers ratio linearly grows with the number of followings(that's the growing part of the red line); this fact was not known before thestudy, and it is still not advertised by Twitter.