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Co-Following on Twitter
Kiran Garimella, Ingmar Weber
@gvrkiran, @ingmarweber
Idea
Two Twitter users whose followers have similar friends are similar,
even though they might not share any followers.
Idea
@Lierse@ACF_Fioerntina
Two un-related, small football clubs
@Lierse@ACF_Fioerntina
alice
grunt
frase
bob
elve
dyke
mike alex
luke jake
john
Idea
Get their followers
Idea
@Lierse@ACF_Fioerntina
alice
grunt
frase
bob
elve
dyke
mike alex
luke jake
john
Get the friends of the followers
Idea
@Lierse@ACF_Fioerntina
alice
grunt
frase
bob
elve
dyke
mike alex
luke jake
john
@FIFA @ESPN
Similarity emerges in the 2-hop neighborhood
Idea
@Lierse@ACF_Fioerntina
alice
grunt
frase
bob
elve
dyke
mike alex
luke jake
john
@FIFA @ESPN @ ConchitaWurst
Co-following can also reveal unexpected links
Intuition
• Two Twitter users whose followers have similar friends are similar, even though they might not share any followers.
• Forward links indicate ‘interests’ and so if two users’ followers have similar interests, they tend to be similar.
Intuition (2)
• Users follow a variety of other users: musicians, political parties, food brands, etc.
• These dimensions are not independent.
• E.g. If a user follows @JustinBieber, it is going to be more likely to be a fairly young ‘she’. • Hence, she is also more likey to follow @revlon.
Co-Following and Binary Preferences• Can we predict if a user will prefer @CocaCola over @Pepsi or @GOP over @TheDemocrats?
• Construct co-following feature vectors for entities.
• Tested it on popular rivalries, such as @Puma vs. @Nike, or @Samsung vs. @TheAppleInc
• Removed obvious co-following features., e.g. Following @barackobama, @HouseDemocrats is obvious if you follow @TheDemocrats.
Performance
0 10 20 50 100 2000.660.680.7
0.720.740.760.780.8
0.820.840.86
globalknn
Number of features removed
Mea
n A
UC
Mapping the Twittersphere via Co-Following• Using Co-Following feature vectors, we computed pair-wise cosine similarities between users.
• Used Metric Multi-Dimensional scaling to visualize these distances on a 2-D plane.
• Tested for – Popular musicians, rival companies, political parties, etc.
MDS - Musicians
MDS – German Political parties
Other Applications
• Identifying cross-selling opportunities and opportunities for Computational Social Science
• If you follow @BMW, follow @Starbucks
• User Recommendation
• If you follow @McDonalds, @Puma, @ESPN, .. You might like @Rihanna
Thank you!
