TwiCube: A real-time twitter off-line community analysis tool

Abstract

As a micro-blogging service, Twitter differs from other social network services in two ways: 1) the absence of mutual consent in establishing follow links and 2) being a mixture of news media and social network. A key question to ask in better understanding Twitter user behavior is which part of a user's Twitter network reflects one's real-life social network. TwiCube is an online tool that employs a novel algorithm capable of identifying a user's real-life social community, which we call the user's off-line community, purely from examining the link structure among the user's followers and followees. Based on the identified off-line community, TwiCube provides a summary of the user's interests, tweeting habits and neighborhood popularity analysis. Evaluations from real Twitter users demonstrate that our off-line community detection approach achieves high precision and recall in most cases. © Springer-Verlag 2013.