Tracking Reciprocal Twitter Relationships

This post over at RWW reminded me of a similar analysis I did on TechCrunch’s Real-Time Stream Crunchup earlier this year. The bottom line: tracking the actual flow of specific pieces of information is far more powerful than analyzing static, broadly defined relationships.

The idea of the plot in question is to track networks of people who have conversations with each other. In Twitter, we do this by tracking users who mutually “@” message each other, which basically means each user made a public tweet that included the other user in its text.

For the Real-Time Crunchup, this plot ended up looking like this:

On the right, the network is achored by @erickschonfeld, who was the event organizer, and on the left, by @stoweboyd, a prominent antendee. The separation between the two groups is quite striking, as are the interests and comments about the crunchup made by the respective groups.

Now, if we had only looked at friend/follower relationships, we would basically be looking at a big fuzzball — most of those people in fact do follow each other. But in a specific moment, there are de facto social relationships that are formed simply though the actual flow of information. This reciprocal plot represents the core of the core of the social network — the people who are actually engaged and exchanging information and opinions with each other.

This is exactly why social network analysis of Facebook has never really taken off — we don’t care about the “friends”, we care about actual behavior. How is the information flowing?

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