The Complete Picture of the Twitter Social Graph

In this work, we collected the entire Twitter social graph that consists of 537 million Twitter accounts connected by 23.95 billion links, and performed a preliminary analysis of the collected data. In order to collect the social graph, we implemented a distributed crawler on the PlanetLab infrastructure that collected all information in 4 months. Our preliminary analysis already revealed some interesting properties. Whereas there are 537 million Twitter accounts, only 268 million already sent at least one tweet and no more than 54 million have been recently active. In addition, 40% of the accounts are not followed by anybody and 25% do not follow anybody. Finally, we found that the Twitter policies, but also social conventions (like the follow-back convention) have a huge impact on the structure of the Twitter social graph.