Yesterday, Chris Hambly of Social Media Mafia circulatd the link to an online research paper about Twitter. In brief, this research downloaded the last 3201 tweets of about 300K users. Twitter keeps only our last 3201 tweets.
200K were effectively non-users and the remainder provided a sample of network connections for an ‘average’ period of 7 months.
This article caught the imagination of the Twittersphere. One research finding in particular caught people’s eye: that we don’t have conversations with everyone in our Twitter stream.
I would have thought that’s obvious myself. I am also uneasy about the use of the expression ‘average’ without co-reporting the distribution of the data.
This is fun research though. The authors, Huberman, Romero and Wu (2009) make the point that Twitter offers a brilliant opportunty to uplift digitalised network data and learn something about social networks.
That’s my ambition. I want to become a lot more fluent in social network theory. I’ve sent up a wiki & forum, Netinkers, where like-minded people can congregate, initially to parse the Huberman article and then to add others and to suggest lines of research. We may not have the time and resources to do the research ourselves, but students might. They are always on the lookout for ‘doable’ projects.
See you over there when you feel in a scholarly mood. The password is ‘playful’.