The WWW2010 conference is underway in Raleigh, North Carolina.
This is a map of the connections among the population of people who recently tweeted the term “WWW2010”. The size of the profile photos indicates the log scaled number of followers that person has. The edges vary in weight, thicker edges mean more of the three types of connections we track, follows, replies, and mentions, appear between any two people.
This is April 29th:
This is April 28th:
A row of isolated people stand at the bottom of the graph, mentioning “www2010” but lacking any visible connection to anyone else who tweets the same term.
The giant component is dominated by the corporate twitter accounts for information technology companies and prominent researchers in the field.
One way to rank people in a network is in terms of how “between” they are — how much they occupy a position that is like a bridge between otherwise disconnected people or groups. There is a correlation between the number of connections and your betweenness centrality, but it is possible to be very between and have just a few (at least two!) connections.
In this layout the x axis is the log of the number of followers and the y axis is the log of the number of tweets. Some people out perform the relationship between tweets and followers, attracting more followers for fewer tweets than others. Above the diagonal, some people lag in terms of their tweet to follower ratio.
These reports and images were generated with NodeXL, the free and open social media network analysis add-in for Excel 2007/2010. The dataset 2010 – April – 28 – NodeXL – Twitter www2010 is available here. A book, Analyzing social media networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, is forthcoming summer 2010 from Morgan Kaufmann and from Amazon.