26 April 2011 | Lichan Hong
There's a tendency on the part of designers, researchers, and others to assume that English-language users' behaviors in social networks generalize to that of other language users. But in a recent study where we examined 62 million tweets collected over a four-week period, we found significant differences in how people of different language backgrounds used features such as URLs, hashtags, mentions, replies, and retweets. But first: how did we examine this large-scale data set?
25 January 2011 | ed h. chi
There are of course a lot more details on the 'Location' field study in the previous post, which was covered by various press outlets (Seattle PI, AllThingD, ReadWriteWeb, NYTimes.) There are several further details that're worth pondering about: Fir...
25 January 2011 | ed h. chi
There are of course a lot more details on the 'Location' field study in the previous post, which was covered by various press outlets (Seattle PI, AllThingD, ReadWriteWeb, NYTimes.) There are several further details that're worth pondering about: Fir...
16 August 2010 | Lichan Hong
In a previous post, I described a recent study in which we found that including hashtags in a tweet enhances the retweetability of the tweet. In this post, I'll focus on another factor that might affect retweetability: the URL.
9 August 2010 | Editor
In a recent study, Bongwon Suh, Peter Pirolli, Ed H. Chi, and I examined what factors might affect retweetability of a tweet. We will report our findings in an upcoming paper this August in the Second IEEE International Conference on Social Computing [1]. In this post, I focus on a factor that we found to correlate with retweetability: hashtag.
Before I dive into the details, here is some information about the dataset that we used in our study: From Twitter's Spritzer feed, we collected a random sample of public tweets from January 18, 2010 to March 8, 2010, yielding about 74 million tweets. That is, we collected about 1.5 million tweets per day, representing approximately 2-3% of 50 million tweets appearing on Twitter daily.
For each of these 74 million tweets, we scanned for a variety of retweet markers such as "RT @", "RT:@", "retweeting @", "retweet @", "via @", "thx @", "HT @", and "r @" [2]. We found that there are about 8.24 million retweets, accounting for 11.1% of all the tweets. Next, we searched for those tweets and retweets that contain at least one hashtag. We found that 10.1% of tweets and 20.8% of retweets include hashtags, suggesting that a tweet with hashtags is more likely to get retweeted.
We further investigated whether the retweetability of a tweet has anything to do with the type of hashtag it contains. Analyzing the 74 million tweets, we identified the 20 most popular hashtags used in our tweets and the number of tweets containing each hashtag:
| Rank | Hashtag | Number of Tweets |
| 1 | #nowplaying | 355,147 |
| 2 | #ff | 224,760 |
| 3 | #jobs | 124,728 |
| 4 | #fb | 87,959 |
| 5 | #tinychat | 67,225 |
| 6 | #vouconfessarque | 51,578 |
| 7 | #fail | 49,248 |
| 8 | #tcot | 47,394 |
| 9 | #1 | 47,373 |
| 10 | #followfriday | 39,986 |
| 11 | #news | 38,573 |
| 12 | #shoutout | 30,633 |
| 13 | #tweetmyjobs | 30,594 |
| 14 | #bbb | 28,590 |
| 15 | #haiti | 28,563 |
| 16 | #letsbehonest | 27,926 |
| 17 | #iranelection | 27,611 |
| 18 | #quote | 27,541 |
| 19 | #followmejp | 25,940 |
| 20 | #follow | 24,166 |
| Rank | Hashtag | Number of Retweets |
| 1 | #ff | 62,331 |
| 2 | #vouconfessarque | 43,628 |
| 3 | #nowplaying | 29,846 |
| 4 | #tcot | 18,527 |
| 5 | #idothat2 | 16,583 |
| 6 | #ohjustlikeme | 16,531 |
| 7 | #jafizisso | 15,564 |
| 8 | #haiti | 13,829 |
| 9 | #retweetthisif | 12,602 |
| 10 | #iranelection | 12,334 |
| 11 | #quote | 11,475 |
| 12 | #followfriday | 11,170 |
| 13 | #fb | 10,994 |
| 14 | #ihatequotes | 9,982 |
| 15 | #fail | 9,759 |
| 16 | #omgthatssotrue | 9,286 |
| 17 | #1 | 9,124 |
| 18 | #terremotochile | 8,892 |
| 19 | #p2 | 8,719 |
| 20 | #follow | 8,084 |
| Rank | Hashtag | Retweet Rate |
| 1 | #nowplaying | 0.75 |
| 2 | #ff | 2.49 |
| 3 | #jobs | 0.16 |
| 4 | #fb | 1.12 |
| 5 | #tinychat | 0.04 |
| 6 | #vouconfessarque | 7.59 |
| 7 | #fail | 1.78 |
| 8 | #tcot | 3.51 |
| 9 | #1 | 1.73 |
| 10 | #followfriday | 2.51 |

9 August 2010 | Editor
In a recent study, Bongwon Suh, Peter Pirolli, Ed H. Chi, and I examined what factors might affect retweetability of a tweet. We will report our findings in an upcoming paper this August in the Second IEEE International Conference on Social Computing [1]. In this post, I focus on a factor that we found to correlate with retweetability: hashtag.
Before I dive into the details, here is some information about the dataset that we used in our study: From Twitter's Spritzer feed, we collected a random sample of public tweets from January 18, 2010 to March 8, 2010, yielding about 74 million tweets. That is, we collected about 1.5 million tweets per day, representing approximately 2-3% of 50 million tweets appearing on Twitter daily.
For each of these 74 million tweets, we scanned for a variety of retweet markers such as "RT @", "RT:@", "retweeting @", "retweet @", "via @", "thx @", "HT @", and "r @" [2]. We found that there are about 8.24 million retweets, accounting for 11.1% of all the tweets. Next, we searched for those tweets and retweets that contain at least one hashtag. We found that 10.1% of tweets and 20.8% of retweets include hashtags, suggesting that a tweet with hashtags is more likely to get retweeted.
We further investigated whether the retweetability of a tweet has anything to do with the type of hashtag it contains. Analyzing the 74 million tweets, we identified the 20 most popular hashtags used in our tweets and the number of tweets containing each hashtag:
| Rank | Hashtag | Number of Tweets |
| 1 | #nowplaying | 355,147 |
| 2 | #ff | 224,760 |
| 3 | #jobs | 124,728 |
| 4 | #fb | 87,959 |
| 5 | #tinychat | 67,225 |
| 6 | #vouconfessarque | 51,578 |
| 7 | #fail | 49,248 |
| 8 | #tcot | 47,394 |
| 9 | #1 | 47,373 |
| 10 | #followfriday | 39,986 |
| 11 | #news | 38,573 |
| 12 | #shoutout | 30,633 |
| 13 | #tweetmyjobs | 30,594 |
| 14 | #bbb | 28,590 |
| 15 | #haiti | 28,563 |
| 16 | #letsbehonest | 27,926 |
| 17 | #iranelection | 27,611 |
| 18 | #quote | 27,541 |
| 19 | #followmejp | 25,940 |
| 20 | #follow | 24,166 |
| Rank | Hashtag | Number of Retweets |
| 1 | #ff | 62,331 |
| 2 | #vouconfessarque | 43,628 |
| 3 | #nowplaying | 29,846 |
| 4 | #tcot | 18,527 |
| 5 | #idothat2 | 16,583 |
| 6 | #ohjustlikeme | 16,531 |
| 7 | #jafizisso | 15,564 |
| 8 | #haiti | 13,829 |
| 9 | #retweetthisif | 12,602 |
| 10 | #iranelection | 12,334 |
| 11 | #quote | 11,475 |
| 12 | #followfriday | 11,170 |
| 13 | #fb | 10,994 |
| 14 | #ihatequotes | 9,982 |
| 15 | #fail | 9,759 |
| 16 | #omgthatssotrue | 9,286 |
| 17 | #1 | 9,124 |
| 18 | #terremotochile | 8,892 |
| 19 | #p2 | 8,719 |
| 20 | #follow | 8,084 |
| Rank | Hashtag | Retweet Rate |
| 1 | #nowplaying | 0.75 |
| 2 | #ff | 2.49 |
| 3 | #jobs | 0.16 |
| 4 | #fb | 1.12 |
| 5 | #tinychat | 0.04 |
| 6 | #vouconfessarque | 7.59 |
| 7 | #fail | 1.78 |
| 8 | #tcot | 3.51 |
| 9 | #1 | 1.73 |
| 10 | #followfriday | 2.51 |

21 April 2010 | ed h. chi
Information streams have recently emerged as a popular means for information awareness. By information streams we are referring to the general set of Web 2.0 feeds such as status updates on Twitter and Facebook, and news and entertainment in Google Rea...
21 April 2010 | ed h. chi
Information streams have recently emerged as a popular means for information awareness. By information streams we are referring to the general set of Web 2.0 feeds such as status updates on Twitter and Facebook, and news and entertainment in Google Rea...
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