In an ongoing research project, we consider Twitter, the social network service, as a market, in which people produce and consume information by tweeting and following others. Let’s say user A and user B are two frequent tweeters. One interesting question would be “how similar” is the information contained in A’s and B’s tweets. One way to solve this question is of course do a semantic analysis of the two’s tweets. Another way, as we propose, is look at their respective followers. Presumably everyone has a preference on what kind of information she consumes, so her following someone should tell that, to some extent, she likes the one’s tweets. Therefore we can predict that if A’s and B’s tweets are similar, then they should have followers of similar preferences; inversely if A’s and B’s tweets are quite different, then the followers they attract should have quite different preferences.
We define Followers-Similarity-Index (FSI) of A and B as
For fun, I computed the FSIs for the following Chinese twitter users @flypig, @junyu, @turingbook, @mozhixu, @glif, @williamlong, @DashHuang, @Stefsunyanzi, @virushuo, @WangShuo, @xiaolai, @zuola, @wglxh, @wangpei, @gaojiamin, @ag108lau, @arthur369, @mranti, @songshinan, @hecaitou, @duanzi, @isaac, @shizhao, @luoyonghao, @jaqi, @jason5ng32, @maoz, @izlmichael, @roseluqiu, @livid, @onlyswan, @aiww, @fzhenghu, @zhangfacai. There are 34 people and hence 
[In Data] 一些中文 Twitter 用户的 Follower Similarity Index
February 18th, 2010 § 8 comments
I got to read your research paper when it’s done. It sounds so interesting.
BTW – how do you typeset those maths symbols? There is an app for that, too?
yea just a plugin, WP LaTeX
This is truly fascinating! I wonder what makes people follow similar group of people. There’s gotta be more than one explanation. Thanks for sharing your study.
Yes I agree there should be more than one answer, especially when we are talking about twitter users in China.
请教个问题，右侧栏的Isay如何实现的？国内twitter已经被封
用一个叫 twitter tool 的 wp 插件就可以。
楼主在国外？可正常使用twitter？
是。我猜想只要你的服务器在国外，用那个 plugin 应该就可以。