What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?

WhatisTwitter,aSocialNetworkoraNewsMedia?Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue MoonDepartment of Computer Science, KAIST335 Gwahangno, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, Korea{haewoon, chlee, hosung}@an.kaist.ac.kr, sbmoon@kaist.eduABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTIONTwitter, a microblogging service, has emerged as a new mediumTwitter, a microblogging service less than three years old, com-in spotlight through recent happenings, such as an American stu-mands more than 41 million users as of July 2009 and is growingdent jailed in Egypt and the US Airways plane crash on the Hudsonfast. Twitter users tweet about any topic within the 140-characterriver. Twitter users follow others or are followed. Unlike on mostlimit and follow others to receive their tweets. The goal of thisonline social networking sites, such as Facebook or MySpace, thepaper is to study the topological characteristics of Twitter and itsrelationship of following and being followed requires no reciproca-power as a new medium of information sharing.tion. A user can follow any other user, and the user being followedWe have crawled the entire Twitter site and obtained 41:7 millionneed not follow back. Being a follower on Twitter means that theuser profiles, 1:47 billion social relations, 4; 262 trending topics,user receives all the messages (called tweets) from those the userand 106 million tweets. In its follower-following topology analysisfollows. Common practice of responding to a tweet has evolvedwe have ...