Most Influential Twitter Users Revealed
https://www.insidescience.org/news/most-influential-twitter-users-revealed
In class we talked about hubs and authorities, and how to value the links between them by using Authority Update rule and Hub Update rule. This idea of hubs and authorities is connected to the idea of endorsement, which can be interpreted that a page is important or influential if it is cited by other important pages. The same reasoning applies to Twitter tweets.
The article Most Influential Twitter Users Revealed by Devin Powell gives the list of the top 10 most influential Twitter users, and surprisingly celebrities like Lady Gaga and Britney Spears, who has more than 5.6 million followers each, are not on the list. Researcher from Hewlett-Packard’s Social Computing Lab in Palo Alto, California have developed a new ranking system that is similar to Pagerank to measures a tweeter’s influence on Twitter. Instead of looking at how many followers a user has, the algorithm investigates how often followers click on a posted link and then repost, or retweet. The goal is to find out who can spread ideas throughout the crowd. Researches find that some people with very few followers can have an unexpected large impact, because things like painting or jokes can easily got retweeted.
We can think of retweets as hubs and users as authorities and we have arrows pointing from retweets to users. Then the algorithm counts how often posts are retweeted and weighs every users in the network by the strength of their connections to everyone else. The users with the highest value is considered the most influential or authoritative. This can relate to what we talked about in class about Pagerank, in which the relative importance of a website can be found by performing equilibrium Pagerank.