MEASURING NODE IMPORTANCE: A MULTI-CRITERIA APPROACH

Abstract

Social Networks are created whenever people interact with other people. Online Social Networks, like Twitter and Facebook gained considerable popularity in the last years. With the popularity of Web applications and increasing reliance on mobile handheld devices, socializing over the Web has become an integral part of our daily lives. Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service; it creates several new interesting social network structures. In this sense, our main goals are study and analyze topological structure of retweet network and investigate the power of retweet mechanism. The findings suggest that relations of "friendship" at Twitter are important but not enough. Still, the centrality measures of a node importance do not show how important users are. We uncovered some other principles that must be studied like, homophily phenomenon, the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others.