Authors:
Francesco Buccafurri
;
Gianluca Lax
;
Serena Nicolazzo
and
Antonino Nocera
Affiliation:
University Mediterranea of Reggio Calabria, Italy
Keyword(s):
Assortativity, Social Network Analysis, Twitter.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Social Networks and Organizational Culture
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Web 2.0 and Social Networking Controls
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
Assortativity is the preference for a person to relate to others who are someway similar. This property has
been widely studied in real-life social networks in the past and, more recently, great attention is devoted to
study various forms of assortativity also in online social networks, being aware that it does not suffice to apply
past scientific results obtained in the domain of real-life social networks. One of the aspects not yet analyzed
in online social networks is interest assortativity, that is the preference for people to share the same interest
(e.g., sport, music) with their friends. In this paper, we study this form of assortativity on Twitter, one of the
most popular online social networks. After the introduction of the background theoretical model, we analyze
Twitter, discovering that users clearly show interest assortativity. Beside the theoretical assessment, our result
leads to identify a number of interesting possible applications.