1. The Emergence of Conventions in Online Social Networks @farshadkt * @nicesea † @nekozzang † @kgummadi * @winteram ‡ MPI-SWS * KAIST † Stevens Institute of Technology ‡ The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti1

2. Imperial Metric 2

3. Linguistic conventions The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti Hey How’s it going Good day Hello 3

4. The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti4

5. Why retweeting convention? o Information-sharing channels are explicit in Twitter o Specific to Twitter: exposures within the community o Contained in Twitter, hence capturing all usages The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti5

6. Twitter dataset o Crawled near-complete data from 03-2006 to 09-2009 -54 million users -1.9 billion tweets -1.7 billion follow links o Follow links are a snapshot of the network The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti6

7. The retweeting variations o Searched for syntax token @username o “Adopter” refers to a user using the variation at least once Variation# of adopters# of retweets RT1,836 K53,221 K via751 K5367 K Retweeting50 K296 K Retweet36 K110 K HT8 K22 K R/T5 K28 K  3 K18 K Total2,059 K59,065 K The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti7

8. Origins Early adopters Majority acceptance The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti8

9. What are the very first use cases? The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti Via Mar’07  Sep’08 RT Jan’08 R/T Jun’08 Retweeting Jan’08 Retweet Nov’07 HT Oct’07 9

10. Via started from natural language The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti @JasonCalacanis (via @kosso) - new Nokia N-Series phones will do Flash, Video and YouTube Via Mar’07  Sep’08 RT Jan’08 R/T Jun’08 Retweeting Jan’08 Retweet Nov’07 HT Oct’07 10

11. HT started from blog communities The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti The Age Project: how old do I look? http://tweetl.com/21b ( HT @technosailor ) Via Mar’07  Sep’08 RT Jan’08 R/T Jun’08 Retweeting Jan’08 Retweet Nov’07 HT Oct’07 11

12. The first Twitter-specific variation The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti Retweet @HealthyLaugh she is in the Boston Globe today, for a Stand up show she’s doing tonight. Add the funny lady on Tweeter! Via Mar’07  Sep’08 RT Jan’08 R/T Jun’08 Retweeting Jan’08 Retweet Nov’07 HT Oct’07 12

13. RT was an adaption to constraints The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti RT @BreakingNewsOn: "LV Fire Department: No major injuries and the fire on the Monte Carlo west wing contained east wing nearly contained." Via Mar’07  Sep’08 RT Jan’08 R/T Jun’08 Retweeting Jan’08 Retweet Nov’07 HT Oct’07 13

14. Some start from explicit discussions The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti @ev of @biz re: twitterkeys ★ http://twurl.nl/fc6trd Via Mar’07  Sep’08 RT Jan’08 R/T Jun’08 Retweeting Jan’08 Retweet Nov’07 HT Oct’07 14

15. Origins Early adopters Majority acceptance The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti15

16. Early adopters are more tech-savvy The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti Random users Early adopters 16

17. Early adopters are more innovative Early adoptersRandom users Has Bio94%25% Profile Pic99%50% Changed profile theme 91%40% Has Location95%36% Has Lists57%4% Has URL85%14% The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti17

18. Early adopters are more popular The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti Much higher number of followers 80% of early adopters in top 1% based on PageRank 18

19. Defining the diffusion network o Each adopter is a node in the graph. o There is a link from A to B if A was exposed to the variation by B. The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti19

20. Diffusion network of first 500 adopters of Retweet The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti20

21. Diffusion network of first 500 adopters of RT The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti21

22. Early adopter network o Average number of exposures: 2.9 – 6.4 o Average clustering coefficient: 0.233 - 0.320 o Criticality: fraction of users who were only exposed because of the most critical user: 0.5% - 4.9% Early adopters’ diffusion networks are dense and clustered. There is no single critical user. The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti22

23. Convention had different spread patterns from the URLs o URLs’ early adopters are not necessarily core users o The diffusion network is not dense and clustered o There are critical users in the process The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti23

24. Origins Early adopters Majority acceptance The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti24

25. The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti25

26. The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti Variations have different growth rates Some variations are growing and some dying at the end Only two variations became dominant RT via 26

27. Wide-spread vs normal adoptions The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti Successful variations reached peripheral users In tune with two-step flow theory Successful variations reached peripheral users In tune with two-step flow theory 27

28. Summary o Conventions emerged in an organic, bottom-up manner o Early adopters are core members of the community: Active, tech-savvy, popular, and innovative o Social conventions start spreading through dense and clustered networks and there is no critical user o When variations got popular, they reached out side of core community The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti28

29. Thank you! Twitter data shared at twitter.mpi-sws.org The Emergence of conventions - Farshad Kooti29