Twitter Helps Find Owner of Lost Wedding Photograph
Thirteen years after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 a woman has found the owner of a wedding photo found at Ground Zero on that fatal day. For the past 13 years Elizabeth Stringer Keefe has posted the lost wedding photo on social media networks in the hopes of finding the couple or someone from the wedding party pictured in the photograph. Over these years the photo has been shared on social media by thousands of people each year and this year it made its way back to a member of the wedding party, Fred Mahe, pictured in the photograph. Mahe came across the photo online and reached out to Keefe through Twitter. To make this story more miraculous, Mahe found out about the photo because country artist Blake Shelton had retweeted the photo on Twitter. Artists have millions of online social media followers, unidirectional ties, that allow their activity on social media to reach a wider audience. This stands as a real life example of the impact that social media has in the world around us. Social media has made it possible for such a story to be possible.
In this particular example, the nodes are people who are on social media and the ties are the friendships between nodes. These friendships can be observed as those who are “friends” on Facebook and those who “follow” each other on other social sites such as Instagram and Twitter. For networks such as Instagram and Twitter these ties can be either unidirectional or bidirectional because the user (node) does not have to follow everyone who follows them, whereas sites such as Facebook the tie can only be bidirectional because the users must agree to be friends. Social media networks are made of billions of ties that allow people from around the world to connect and be “friends”, using social media as the tie.
The directionality and strength of social network ties are important for the spread of information. Imagine node A is a member of social network sites X and Y, node B may only be a member of network Y, and node C is a member of social network sites Y and Z. Looking exclusively at the connections between these three nodes, nodes A and C could not be connected through a social network site because they are not members of any of the same social network sites, however node B is connected to both node A and C because they all belong to social network site Y. Since nodes A and C both belong to another social network site, X and Z respectively, the information they receive through network Y can be spread to two other unrelated networks.
http://www.today.com/news/social-media-helps-women-find-owner-wedding-photo-found-ground-1D80146627