Over the past few years, growth on Twitter has exploded, with its 2009 user base a 900 percent increase over 2008. Through short 140 character texts, as well as the profusion of smartphones and Twitter-enabled mobile clients, Twitter helps users connect more frequently and at a much lower time cost, compared to sending an email, or posting a blog entry. Although Twitter was created primarily to answer the question, “what are you doing?”, as of recently Twitter has been used to quickly broadcast breaking news, marketing, and to reach out to a large connected audience. Because Twitter is more than just your own social network, the opaque value problem does not plague it as much as Facebook and one can see a lot more network connections than on any other social networking platform. Twitter allows a person to instantly find out what people are talking about the immediately relevant, right now. And while a tweet is like a regular text message, its public nature makes its social reach and value significantly greater. Without a doubt, the networks surrounding tweets are intriguing and at present not as carefully studied as other media forms. Exactly because the barrier to composing and writing a tweet is so low, it is conceivable that the networks on Twitter are actually more representative of networks of people than if one analyzed email messages, for example.

It is immediately apparent how one can build a network structure in Twitter by noting that users have followers and those they are following, and connecting people that mutually follow each other with strong ties and weak ties otherwise. However, one other interesting aspect of how tweets are linked together are through retweets, or a rebroadcasting of information, much like how one forwards an email message. In fact, third party developers implemented retweeting and users began utilizing such features en masse before it was even officially supported. This evolving behavior is present in any network, where people attempt to form links with other people through the limits of the communication system. Retweeting adds a new dimension to the complex structure of the Twitter userbase, and through looking at the spread of retweets from person to person, it is very possible to study tipping point effects in terms of how many retweets is necessary before a news item tips and penetration rate increases exponentially. When retweets cross groups of Twitter users through the influential members, or mavens (with low embeddedness) of the Twitter community, connected to each other by weak links, the information they contain spreads much more rapidly.

With an emphasis on retweets, a recent paper talks of recent trends regarding the top trending topics or hash tags, and attempts to visualize their growth and fall, as well as study how different types of users make up the user bases for different types of topics, like how those who tweet about Grey’s Anatomy might be predominantly female viewers. We see how buzz around country-specific topics is generally confined to that network of a country’s users, though Twitter allows the whole world to comment and discuss just about any issue. While networks based on retweets and replies (@) may form and dissipate rapidly against time for time-sensitive, comparatively impersonal topics like “Nizar” and “TwitHit” for example, more personal, common and non-trending topics like “coffee” or even those based on specific interest groups like “Revolverheld” have relatively stable communities around them and likewise constant network structures.