Who's looking at who - Yahoo research

Image from http://www.savagechickens.com/2010/04/mutual.html

Based on Laswell's maxim: "who says what to whom in what channel with what effect." Yahoo research concluded that 20,000 "elite users" generate about half of all tweets consumed.  The researchers are from Cornell University (Shaomei Wu) and Yahoo  (Winter Mason, Jake Hofman, and Duncan Watts).  They classified "elite users" through the analysis of Twitter lists and placed them into four categories: celebrities, bloggers, media outlets, and organizations.

The research finds that even though media outlets are by far the most active users on Twitter, only about 15% of tweets consumed by "ordinary users" are received directly from the media. The implication is that users are paying attention to other sources of information or are receiving those tweets not directly from the media but as retweets.

Of specific interest is that media outlets, blogs, organizations, and celebrities, tend to be siloed, often just consuming and retweeting the tweets of those in the same category.

Figure 4 gives an idea of who is listens to whom?

The research concludes that attention is highly homophilous, celebrities overwhelmingly pay attention to other celebrities, and so on. The one slight exception to this rule is that organizations pay more attention to bloggers than to themselves." Bloggers, unlike those in other categories, are more likely to retweet information outside their own categories, reflecting the "characterization of bloggers as recyclers and filters of information."

With regards to content that was being tweeted, world news, U.S. news and sports news to be the most popular. It also examined the different lifespans of content, finding that media-originated URLs tended to be short-lived, while content originated by bloggers tended to be "overrepresented among long-lived URLs." The longest-lived URLs are dominated by content such as videos and music, items that are shared and reshared on Twitter and appear to "persist indefinitely."

In their own words “By restricting our attention to URLs shared on Twitter, our conclusions are necessarily limited to one narrow cross section of the media landscape. An interesting direction for future work would therefore be to apply similar methods to quantifying information flow via more traditional channels, such as TV and radio on the one hand, and interpersonal interactions on the other hand. …Finally, another two areas for future work are first, to extract content information in a more systematic manner—the “what” of Lasswell’s maxim; and second, to focus more on the effects of communication by merging the data regarding information flow on Twitter with other sources of outcome data, such as the opinions or actions of the recipients of the information.”