

Mining Twitter follower network of 36 million users - aksbhat
http://www.akshaybhat.com/LPMR

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buza
I'm curious about how these classifications were done. I graduated from the
MIT Media Lab a few years back, and after looking through the result set
titled:

"A small community of users associated with MIT Media lab detected using the
algorithm after 7th iteration"

I saw a handful of MIT undergrads listed, many of which I'm certain had no
affiliation with the Media lab, while nearly all of the others I do not
recognize, even as an active Twitter user. I chose two random entries from
this list: 'RFheargaile' and 'realduedate', and found both to be of extremely
dubious authenticity.

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aksbhat
I agree they are not very high confidence classifications. Due to random
nature of the algorithm, It is very hard to correctly label a community. Also
since for most users explicit permission to follow is not required which leads
to dubious/spam users. Since the data was collected in June 2009, it is
possible that a lot of users might have blocked spam profiles from following
them.

I guess I need to clarify this point.

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citricsquid
why is the com in the title of this post in capitals, when it links to
lowercase .com and the site has no redirect to .COM in place.

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aksbhat
I made a mistake in typing the url.

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samratjp
This is really cool stuff! Did you come across any interesting retweeters and
spam rings?

