Characterization of the twitter @replies network: are user ties social or topical?

Abstract

In recent years, social media services have become a global phenomenon on the Internet. The popularity of these services provides an opportunity to study the characteristics of online social networks and the communities that emerge in them. This paper presents an analysis of the users' interactions in the implicit network derived from tweet replies of a specific dataset obtained from a popular micro-blogging service, Twitter. We analyze the influence of the topics of the tweet messages on the interaction among users, to determine if the social aspect prevails over the topic in the moment of interaction. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to investigate if people selectively choose whom to reply to based on the topic or, otherwise, if they reply to anyone about anything. We found that the social aspect predominantly conditions users' interactions. For users with larger and denser ego-centric networks, we observed a slight tendency for separating their connections depending on the topics discussed.