In a study published in the May 6, 2013 issue of online peer-reviewed journal First Monday, Kalev H. Leetaru, Shaowen Wang, Guofeng Cao, Anand Padmanabhan and Eric Shook said Manila is the 17th out of the world’s top 20 cities where georeferenced posts on Twitter come from.
However, the strong presence of Twitter in the United States, the authors said in their paper entitled “Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat: The geography of Twitter,” can be seen in the fact that six of the top 20 cities are from the country.
Jakarta topped the list with 2.86% of tweets, followed by New York, Sao Paulo, Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Istanbul, London, Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, Madrid, Los Angeles, Singapore, Houston, Mexico City, Philadelphia, Dallas, Manila, Brussels, Tokyo and Moscow.
About 0.90% of georeferenced tweets tracked by Silicon Graphics International, the University of Illinois and social media data vendor GNIP through the Twitter Decahose were from Manila.
The Twitter Decahose, according to GNIP, is a feed of 10% of all Tweets, selected at random and delivered in realtime.
Tweets with no recorded location values were not included in the study. Also, the inclusion of location values in people’s posts may have been limited by the availability of geographic tagging in each country, as did the bans placed on Twitter in countries such as Iraq and China.
According to the study, the locations recorded reflected many aspects of life in each country, such as culture and the availability of electricity.
“The volume of tweets and the penetration of electricity were found to be correlated…indicating very high similarity. Intuitively, this makes sense in that Twitter is more likely to be used as a part of daily life in areas that have readily available electricity to support the landline or mobile Internet connectivity needed by Twitter,” the scientists said.
“It also demonstrates that despite high mobile use, Twitter is not a replacement for satellite and other air and space–based sensor systems of society—it is still reliant on the same electrical and network infrastructure as other Internet media.”
English is king
Most tweets they tracked, the scientists said, were in English.
This means that while many people on social media are multilingual and use their native languages together with English in their posts, English is still the most-used language on Twitter, comprising 41.57% of all georeferenced tweets and 38.25% of all tweets on the site.
One reason, they said, is that people use social media to speak with people outside their countries, whose primary language may be different from their own.
“In the traditional realm of ‘face to face’ communication, users may speak only with those physically near them. The Internet era on the other hand has created a world in which a person may speak to another on the other side of the planet with just a few millisecond delay, effectively removing the geographic barrier,” the authors said.
Small world
They said their findings suggest that social media is having a significant impact on the role of distance of people from each other on communication and influence of one person over another—regardless of how far one person is from another, social media is allowing them to be in touch with each other and relate to each other’s issues.
“Indonesia, Western Europe, Africa, and Central America have high proportions of the world’s most influential Twitter users,” they said, despite most users being based in the United States.
The study used a month’s worth of data of the Twitter Decahose, consisting of over 1.5 billion tweets from more than 70 million users.
Just over three percent of all tweets include native geolocation information, with two percent offering street address–level resolution in real–time, the authors said.
source: www.abs-cbnnews.com
