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On word-of-mouth based discovery of the web

Published: 02 November 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Traditionally, users have discovered information on the Web by browsing or searching. Recently, word-of-mouth has emerged as a popular way of discovering the Web, particularly on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. On these sites, users discover Web content by following URLs posted by their friends. Such word-of-mouth based content discovery has become a major driver of traffic to many Web sites today. To better understand this popular phenomenon, in this paper we present a detailed analysis of word-of-mouth exchange of URLs among Twitter users. Among our key findings, we show that Twitter yields propagation trees that are wider than they are deep. Our analysis on the geolocation of users indicates that users who are geographically close together are more likely to share the same URL.

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cover image ACM Conferences
IMC '11: Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
November 2011
612 pages
ISBN:9781450310130
DOI:10.1145/2068816
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 02 November 2011

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Author Tags

  1. information diffusion
  2. social networks
  3. web content discovery
  4. word-of-mouth

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  • Research-article

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IMC '11
IMC '11: Internet Measurement Conference
November 2 - 4, 2011
Berlin, Germany

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