Content area
Full text
Abstract
Twitter is a microblogging service that commands more than 288 million monthly active users (in 2015) and is growing fast. Twitter users post short messages called tweet about any topic and follow others to receive their tweets. The great amount of data coming from Twitter users is a meaning source of information regarding different aspects of people life. The goal of this paper is to mine such information through the study of the tweets posted in the time interval of one year. The analysis performed on these data allows us to draw meaningful conclusions about the behavior and preference of Twitter users.
Keywords
Social network analysis; Information; User behavior
Introduction
With the term Big Data we refer to a great amount of data difficult to process using traditional data processing applications. Social networks are an important and inexhaustible source of big data, and even the mere extraction of such data from social networks is hard. Knowing the behavior of users when they operate in a social network has attracted and attracts the attention of the scientific community. Indeed, better understanding user behavior is a key issue in several contexts: for example, this allows Internet and OSN providers to guide infrastructural and application-level actions; users themselves to enhance awareness in this potentially insecure world; companies and government institutions to make better use of this huge network of people for their finalities; scientists to better understand individuals and communities.
Among the social networks, Twitter, with its 288 million monthly active users in 2015 (Statista, 2015), is one of the most important generator of data stream thanks to the widely-used Tweets, 140-character messages posted by users to express their opinion on a topic, a situation, a news, and so on. These short messages allow users to keep in touch each other easily and to share opinions. Such opinions have a social weight because they are publicly visible and the post of a tweet may discover several aspects of a person life. Consequently, the analysis of tweets has a great importance both from a sociological perspective and to better understand the interaction between Twitter and its users. However, a mere analysis of the more than 500,000,000 tweets per day (InternetLiveStats, 2015) is too time-expensive and meaningless as...