Small World? A Snapshot of How My Twitter “Friends” Follow Each Other…

I’m now following about 500 or so people on Twitter, but to what extent are they following each other? Are there any noticeable subgroups in the folk I follow, by virtue of them being highly linked to each other in the friends and following stakes?

Each of the nodes represents one of my Twitter friends (that is, each node represents a separate person I follow on Twitter).

Node size is proportional to the number of my friends who are following other of my friends.

Node colour is proportional the the number of my friends that person is following (blue is cold – low number; red is hot – high number).

The graph is an indication of the extent to which the people I follow (that is, my friends…) is an echo chamber…

Running the Gephi “connected cpmponents” statistic, it seems that the group is pretty tightly connected… There is one noticeable separate component that contains more than a singleton, from a few accounts I followed last year…:

If I look at the labels for the other separate components (not shown), they mainly correspond to people with private accounts, although there are a couple of people who are completely independent of the rest of my Twitter social circle.

The Gephi modularity class statistic, however, suggests there is a little more structure hiding in there…

(This is a random algorithm, so it may give slightly different answers each time it is run…)

Let’s peek inside them…

Looks a bit educationalist to me…;-)

How about this one:

Hmm. Government and open data, maybe? What next…?

BBC and journ hack types, with a bit of datajourn thrown in maybe?

Hmmm – the next one looks like an OU cluster:

And that leaves….

JISC, museums and libraries…

Seems about right to me:-)

PS Images produced using Gephi… Note to self: start spending a ittle more time about tidying up the presentation of some of these images…;-)

PPS for a similar exercise applied to my Facebook friends, see Getting Started With The Gephi Network Visualisation App – My Facebook Network, Part IV