Graphing Out Your Twitter Network

by Anita Campbell

July 31, 2008 at 11:34 pm · Filed under KM, social networks

Ever wonder what your Twitter network looks like visually? And what it might tell you about your network connections, your career, your business — even your life?

Valdis Krebs at Inflow has created a fascinating Twitter network map, showing everyone connected with him on Twitter:

This Twitter map shows 3 network clusters. Each cluster consists of a group of people with shared interests:

Green – consisting of people in various economic development projects in Cleveland and Northest Ohio
Red — a group that Valdis dubs the Digerati, i.e., well-known people in the online technology communities
Blue – knowledge management consultants

The map is immediately helpful visually because it helps you “see” important information. In a blog post entitled “Twitter Maps,” Valdis analyzes his own network. He even provides a short list of 7 action items to expand his network.

For instance, he says he needs “more diversity of info/topics/knowledge to monitor.” He goes on to say he should also expand his network to include conversations around electronic music, his hobby.

This is an interesting analysis of your own professional and personal development by looking at who you are connected with on Twitter.

Open question: could businesses that use Twitter do a similar type of analysis to understand their Twitter “user base” better? What kinds of things would such a map tell them?

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4 Comments »

Hi Anita… Very cool!!!. I wish it was something we could all generate based on our own contacts. This looks like the output of what Atlas for Lotus Connections does. Inside IBM we’ve found that it helps in the following areas:

* Finding groups that are not talking to each other but should (perhaps the blue and red groups should be talking more to generate more ideas/promote out of the inbox thinking?)

* Finding the ‘bridges’ throughout an organization - Specially important during Mergers & Acquisitions, when combining two organizations together it’s often best to figure out how to best connect them. Finding the bridges accomplishes this

Atlas can also:
* Find experts in a related topic based on their blog posts, forums, etc. (in this case, if it were connected to Twitter, it could figure out, based on the conversations, who are the experts in a particular topic).

Yes, I love this kind of map and wish I could generate one for my own Twitter account. I believe I read that Valdis would like to get some funding and some help to create a “roll your own” kind of Twitter mapping tool. Right now I think each map has to be custom created. Perhaps Valdis will wander by and clarify that for us.

Thanks for the heads up about Atlas for Lotus Connections, too. Worth exploring.

There’s just a post up at Harvard Business Online, about the different “networks” on Facebook:

“As Facebook evolves, it continues to create internal points of equilibrium within sub-networks, which Facebook calls groups or (surprise) networks. As they describe it, “Facebook is made up of many networks, each based around a workplace, region, high school or college.” Each of these networks is tightly connected, in the sense that they have many users that have strong connections to one another. Across networks, those users have more sparse relationships, just as the brain’s neurons link mostly to those neurons within their sub-networks. ”

I think that because of the high specialization of today, it’s valuable to be part of different networks like these. It’s like being multidisciplinary.

Luis, this software also does all of those things you describe above. I have been working with IBM since the early 1990s on social network analysis [SNA]. Many consultants @ IBM [former IBM Consulting Group] use my other SNA software. Here are a few articles about their experiences…
http://www.orgnet.com/IBMCOPSNA.pdf
http://www.orgnet.com/IBMMoC.pdf

I am working with a colleague on how to best retrieve data from Twitter… as you know the site gets overwhelmed from all of the tweeting activity, so the API only allows sporadic access.

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