Finally I found a research paper that analyzes Twitter from a network analytical perspective. The main message of the paper “Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope” by Huberman, Romero and Wu (see also Jeremiah Owyang’s summary) is: the number of people you follow on Twitter is not the whole truth. It’s more interesting [...]
Global web? Sounds like redundancy, but in fact many phenomena on the world wide web aren’t so global at all. Although non-western languages are of rising importance online, English still is the most spoken language on the web. And so it should be clear that Barack Obama’s election is mostly an American or perhaps Western [...]
After I saw the fail whale on Twitter again after a long whale-free period, I thought it was time to actualize my timeline of whale sightings. The first fail whale had been spotted last June. And after five months this meme is still going strong.
Some users feared that they would not be able to [...]
What is it that is really interesting for the Google population? The financial crisis? No, that’s what the media is interested in. People searching Google really are looking for cupcakes, sex toys and wizards. At least, that’s what Jonathan Stein found out when he compared the different search terms with Google Trends.
In the meanwhile the [...]
A while ago, I compared the numbers for some of the big German websites and portals as measured by Google’s AdPlanner with the results published by the AGOF or Arbeitsgemeinschaft Online Forschung (Study Group Online Research).
Now it’s been one month and I did a short comparison of last month’s Google numbers with this month’s. The [...]
When it comes to the total number of Twitter users, nobody I know had ever been able to get some information out of Biz & Co. So we are left with informed guesses. I fine method of guessing the total number compares different location based subgroups of Twitter users on TwitDir and Twitter. Because location [...]
O’Reilly just published a short research item on the age distribution of Facebook users and especially the relative changes between May and now. The message is:
Among the major Facebook age segments, the fastest growing are teens (13-17) and young (26-34) to middle-age (35-44) professionals, with the growth in teens driven by non-U.S. markets. Also note [...]
Lifestreaming and microblogging - both tend to overlap as most lifestream services allow for short status messages and most microblogs or activity streams allow feeding RSS feeds into them - are becoming more and more common in the social web. Some argue that Twitter is increasingly being challenged by other services like Friendfeed, Plurk or [...]
