Paper Info
Title
Ego networks in Twitter: An experimental analysis
Abstract
Online Social Networks are amongst the most important platforms for maintaining social relationships online, supporting content generation and exchange between users. They are therefore natural candidate to be the basis of future humancentric networks and data exchange systems, in addition to novel forms of Internet services exploiting the properties of human social relationships. Understanding the structural properties of OSN and how they are influenced by human behaviour is thus fundamental to design such human-centred systems. In this paper we analyse a real Twitter data set to investigate whether well known structures of human social networks identified in “offline” environments can also be identified in the social networks maintained by users on Twitter. According to the well known model proposed by Dunbar, offline social networks are formed of circles of relationships having different social characteristics (e.g., intimacy, contact frequency and size). These circles can be directly ascribed to cognitive constraints of human brain, that impose limits on the number of social relationships maintainable at different levels of emotional closeness. Our results indicate that a similar structure can also be found in the Twitter users' social networks. This suggests that the structure of social networks also in online environments are controlled by the same cognitive properties of human brain that operate offline.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/INFCOM.2013.6567181
INFOCOM Workshops
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
data exchange systems,twitter data set,emotional closeness,structural property,social relationship maintenance,cognition,intimacy,size,ego networks,internet services,ego network,humancentric networks,Twitter,online social relationship maintenance,human-centred system,online social network,cognitive constraints,human-centred systems,human behaviour,internet,Internet,human social networks,experimental analysis,contact frequency,online social networks,content generation,human social relationship,data exchange system,social networking (online),Internet service,offline environment,offline social network,social sciences computing,cognitive constraint,humancentric network,human social network,human brain,human social relationships,social characteristics,content exchange
Conference
0743-166X
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4673-5944-3
16
0.77
References 
Authors
7
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Valerio Arnaboldi124011.51
Marco Conti23862204.60
Andrea Passarella323012.67
Fabio Pezzoni41638.08