Impact of Offline Boundaries on Online Information Exchange
High Level Goal
It is a known fact that user interactions in the offline world are strongly affected by political, geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. Peoople tend to interact more with other people who live near by, or whom they can meet by travelling freely or who speak the same languages as them.
We want to explore whether such offline societal divisions affect user interactions in the online world too. However, to date, few studies have investigated the impact of the offline boundaries in the online world.
Therefore our high-level goal is to understand the extent to which offline boundaries affect online user relationships and interactions on the online social networks.
Trading Tweets across National Boundaries
As a first step, we are analyzing the manifestation of these offline boundaries in the Twitter social network.
Our aim is to study how do users trade information with other users both within and across national boundaries.
We have analyzed 1.7 Billion tweets posted by 52 million Twitter users before September 2009.
And we resolved the location information for 12.2 million users in the Twitter network by using the location field entered by the user and the timezone chosen by the user.
For doing the resolution we used Bing and Yahoo Map APIs.
This is a simple visualization of the trade of tweets or information both across and within the national boundaries.
For more information on the metrics we are using, please take a look at this.
Click on each country to take a look at which are the top 5 producers of the tweets being consumed by a country or the top 5 consumers of the tweets being produced by a country.
Also you can see the trade imabalance for each country by clicking on it.