Group #2 Project Final Report: Information Flows on Twitter

Twitter has become a very popular microblog website and had attracted millions of users up to 2009. It is generally considered as a social networking website but gradually also used as a media for people or companies to spread out news or marketing information. One reason for considering Twitter as a media that broadcasts information instead of a social network is that on Twitter the friendship between two users are asymmetric 1 and according to [1] only 22.1% of the relationships are reciprocal. This is very different from the online messenging services such as MSN or Google Chat. However, different from the traditional media like TV or newspapers, a user can easily propagate an information she saw from other users to her followers by retweet, which is an automatic way of duplicating others’ posts on the reader’s Twitter board. The retweet function is critical for making the information available to a large number of users. However, in the online environment, we know sometimes people see but not really read the content.