Discovering social structures of local influence by using tweetStimuli

Abstract

Information diffusion in large-scale networks has been studied to identify the users influence. The influence has been targeted as a key feature either to reach large populations or influencing public opinion. Through the use of micro-blogs, such as Twitter, global influencers have been identified and ranked based on message propagation (retweets). In this paper, a new application is presented, which allows to find first and classify then the local influence on Twitter: who have influenced you and who have been influenced by you. Until now, social structures of tweets’ original authors that have been either retweeted or marked as favourites are unobservable. Throughout this application, these structures can be discovered and they reveal the existence of communities formed by users of similar profile (that are connected among them) interrelated with other similar profile users’ communities.

Keywords:

• influence
• social networks
• clustering
• social structures

2010 AMS Subject Classifications:

• 91C20
• 62H30
• 68U35
• 62H20
• 68T99

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by SuperHub Project ICT-2011.6.6 and by grant 2009 SGR 1365 to KEMLG group from Catalan Government Agency (AGAUR) for consolidated groups.

Notes

1. http://twitter.com