Chapter 10 - Twitter: Conversation, Entertainment, and Information, All in One Network!

Abstract

This chapter introduces the social media network Twitter and discusses how one can tap into and map parts of the global Twitter conversation. Twitter can be thought of as a conversational microblog. Like bloggers, Twitter users post messages that show up in the streams of all the people who are subscribed to them. Twitter's infrastructure in this way mirrors the functionality of really simple syndication (RSS) feeds. Analyzing Twitter users and conversations is more than tabulating counts and trends—it's about connections and interactions between people. It describes how social network analysis techniques can help to examine Twitter network and how the flow of the global conversation can be tracked. Collecting Twitter data with NodeXL is a simple and straightforward process. Collecting data from Twitter is generally a slow process; therefore, when collecting data from Twitter, one needs to be aware of “rate limits.” Twitter limits the amount of data collected by any one user to 150 “requests” per hour. NodeXL provides several options for speeding up data collections, such as artificially limiting the number of users in the data set. NodeXL helps to extract and analyze many different social networks from Twitter.