Social Network Analysis And Information Dissemination Study

With the rapid development of the concept of Web2.0, social networking as an emerging practical dating mode plays an increasingly important role in the network activity. Microblogging is a new form of social networking in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October,2006. Microblogging users follow others or are followed. Unlike on most online social networking sites, such as Facebook or Myspace, the relationship of following and being followed requires no reciprocation. Being a follower means that the user receives all the messages from those the user follows. The retweet mechanism empowers users to spread information of their choice beyond the reach of the original tweet’s followers. This makes microblogging not only has social attributes, but also is an important medium of information diffusion.We use an Sina Application Programming Interface(API) to crawl and collect data. The goal of this work is to study the topological characteristics of microblogging and its power as a new medium of information sharing. We begin with the network analysis and study the distributions of the number of original tweets. Next we construct retweet trees and examine their temporal characteristics in order to study the relevant factors of information diffusion. Finally, we construct a model to predict the cascade size of original tweet using the features of users and retweet trees.