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Open Access

A Comparative Analysis on Weibo and Twitter

Wentao Han, Xiaowei Zhu, Ziyan Zhu, Wenguang Chen, Weimin Zheng, Jianguo Lu( )
Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093, USA. This work was done during his visiting to Tsinghua University.
School of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON N9B 3P4, Canada.
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Abstract

Weibo is the Twitter counterpart in China that has attracted hundreds of millions of users. We crawled an almost complete Weibo user network that contains 222 million users and 27 billion links in 2013. This paper analyzes the structural properties of this network, and compares it with a Twitter user network. The topological properties we studied include the degree distributions, connected components, distance distributions, reciprocity, clustering coefficient, PageRank centrality, and degree assortativity. We find that Weibo users have a higher diversity index, higher Gini index, but a lower reciprocity and clustering coefficient for most of the nodes. A surprising observation is that the reciprocity of Weibo is only about a quarter of the reciprocity of the Twitter user network. We also show that Weibo adoption rate correlates with economic development positively, and Weibo network can be used to quantify the connections between provinces and regions in China. In particular, point-wise mutual information is shown to be accurate in quantifying the strength of connections. We developed an interactive analyzing software framework for this study, and released the data and code online.

Keywords

WeiboTwitteronline social networkcomplex networkmutual information

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Tsinghua Science and Technology
Volume 21 Issue 1,
February 2016
Pages 1-16
DOI: 10.1109/TST.2016.7399279
Cite this article:
Han W, Zhu X, Zhu Z, et al. A Comparative Analysis on Weibo and Twitter. Tsinghua Science and Technology, 2016, 21(1): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1109/TST.2016.7399279

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Received: 23 June 2015
Accepted: 01 July 2015
Published: 04 February 2016
© The author(s) 2016
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