ArXiv (which I only recently discovered while having lunch with the Culturomics folks was pronounced “archive”) has an en excellent study of Twitter using network analysis to reveal that earlier claims for a limit to the number of members of one’s social network are not transcended due to the new technology. The researchers, from the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, distilled the tweets of 3 million users into response trees to see the level of connection between one Tweeter and another. While the userbase may have a wide variety in their number of followers, followees(?) and usage,
By focusing on direct interactions we are able to eliminate the confounding e ffect of users that have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers with whom they have no contact and are able to focus on real person to person interactions…
Social networks have changed they way we use to communicate. It is now easy to be connected with a huge number of other individuals… In this paper we show that social networks did not change human social capabilities. We found that even in the online world cognitive and biological constraints holds as predicted by Dunbar’s theory limiting users social activities.
The paper should be valuable to anyone interested in network analysis, dynamic networks, new media or why Charlie Sheen hasn’t gotten around to tweeting you back.