It is conceivable that social media users do not think that their actions will actually be monitored and analyzed. Thirdly, (as in the case of this analysis) big data have been proved more reliable than any other way of collecting information. Secondly, thanks to the success of the service, the numbers of participants are typically orders of magnitude larger than those in traditional polls. Firstly, Twitter analysis can essentially be done in real time due to the intrinsic digital form of the data. This kind of analysis outperforms traditional polls in three aspects. The general interest in these new media now makes it possible to accumulate information about social habits, allowing for the unprecedented possibility to analyze social phenomena while keeping perturbation as small as possible.
Nowadays, Twitter is used by journalists as the online media of choice to propagate information, and accordingly most of the political debates take place on this social network. Twitter is a platform where anyone can write posts, with a maximum length of 140 characters, known as “tweets”, which show up in their followers' feeds (a “follow” on Twitter does not equate to a symmetrical relationship). In the same spirit, we use data from the microblogging platform Twitter to investigate people's ideas and sentiments. Analysis of the growth of Wikipedia quantifies strength of correlation and cultural similarities/differences. Facebook data reveals the opinions, choices and tastes (and therefore the community structure) of people. Similarly query logs anticipate stock-trading volumes. Note that the issue of actual prediction has been recently challenged ). įor example, the analysis of query logs from search engines and analysis of Twitter anticipates the spreading of the flu – (simple checks of this phenomenon can be tested with the Google service Flutrends - where data are aggregated on a weekly timescale. Irrespective of the technical differences and their usage, the various social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and search engines like Google and Bing, have relevant information stored in their stream of data. Social science, statistical physics, computer science and network theory methods are being used by scientists to deal with these big data analyses.
Not surprisingly then, many studies from different field perspectives are trying to understand how to deal with this new social phenomenon and how to extract information from the continuously growing repositories. Differently from other societal changes in the past, we are now able to track down the onset and evolution of this revolution by inspecting the big-data records of social media. It is fair to say that the present widespread access to the Internet is changing the way in which people interact, exchange information and communicate, resulting in a profound transformation of our society and our economy. The recent growth of social networks has created various communities of millions of users in constant evolution.