These days, I often rely on 3 years old micro-blogging service Twitter to get updated information. Unless I have to search something particular across web, I find myself engrossed in world of tweet & re-tweets more often. Why so? Perhaps, Twitter appears more relevant & updated source of information than Google. And when it comes to finding latest information on literally any topic, Twitter has upper hand over Google or over any other source of information like television etc.
So is Twitter becoming new media source of news? You name any latest event happened in recent times which has wider impact. Now if you are quite active on Twitter, you would receive complete updated information within an hour (within few minutes actually). So be it launch of Apple iPad or Iran revolt or any major plane crash or even latest Indian Premier League matches, you would get every second updated information of the event. How’s it happening?
Four researchers from Department of Computer Science at Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology have performed a multi-part analysis of Twitter. They conclude that, Twitter is surprisingly connected network and effective way to filter quality information. The researchers built array of 20 PCs to consume entire contents of micro-blogging site, generated in a month. As I joined Twitter before July-2009, I was also part of this study.
Generally it is assumed that any two people on the earth are separated by at most six hops. And all major social networks are based on this assumption, also known as ‘Six Degree of Separation’. Researcher Kwak et all, who carried out the multi-part analysis of Twitter observed that only 22.1{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} of the links are reciprocal (I follow you- You follow me). It means that any two people are separated by four hops on Twitter, which is surprisingly lesser than standard social benchmark number ‘6’. What’s more, because 94{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} of people are separated by lesser than five degree of separation, distance between any two people on Twitter is always lesser than what it is in real life. So it means, Shah Rukh Khan will appear closer on Twitter than in real life, which is quite true.
The research work also throws light on the known fact that, to get noticed you need to tweet at a particular time of the day. This happens because half of the re-tweets appears within an hour and rest within a day. And it’s those initial re-tweets make all difference. I myself believe in this theory. If some of your tweets are re-tweeted within an hour of the original tweet, then they will have wider impact than those re-tweets, which are retweeted much later. That’s why, if you re-tweet more within few minutes of original tweets, you will get noticed more often. This is how some Twitter Applications judge that few people more effective in spreading information than others. It’s just time of the day when you tweet/re-tweet that matters and not the content itself.
In the end, study also sheds light on the fact that 67.6{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} of the users are not followed by any of their followings on Twitter. Study calls them lonely people. For them Twitter is just source of information than a social network.
