Abstract
This chapter presents the second data collection, which consists of social networking data mined from the Twitter microblogging platform. This section provides a description of the methods and tools with a detailed discussion of the ethical considerations. With NCL, the focus is on the geolocated twitter data collected for 20 major cities from around the world. The data is used to investigate city activity patterns overall, based on location and time.
It reviews the rise and fall of Digital Social Networks from Myspace and Bebo to Virtual Worlds and Facebook, alongside the location-based services Foursquare, Gowalla and Twitter. Following this overview, the methods of data mining and crowd sourcing are discussed with, in the latter part, a focus on location-based data sets. This then leads to a discussion of the concrete technical aspects of the collection of Twitter data, discussing different strategies and possibilities.
This is followed by a short discussion of the complications with the Twitter data sample in general and specifically the location based data. The next sections are concerned with aspects of data analysis in time-space as well as networks. At the end, the aspects of privacy and ethics are discussed. This extends the general discussion of the ethics relevant to this publication, due to the urgency and grey areas in this field if applied to online social networking data.
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Notes
- 1.
See for details http://www.sixdegrees.org/, the documentation on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com or a blog post on The Dallas Morning News http://www.dougbedell.com/sixdegrees1.html.
- 2.
See their online page on http://www.classmates.com/ and a story on CBSnews online http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/05/60II/main552363.shtml.
- 3.
See it online at http://www.myspace.com/.
- 4.
The Google+ platform was opened for public beta, based on invitation only, on June 28, 2011. After a 2-month test phase on September 20 2011 the service was officially opened to the general public (Cellan-Jones 2011). It can be found at https://plus.google.com/ with an introduction available at http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/.
- 5.
Diaspora was started by a group of five college students in 2010. The development was widely supported by the New York Times (Dwyder 2010) featuring the project prominently during the extended privacy discussion around issues with Facebook’s privacy changes in late 2009 and 2010 as, for example, reported by Anon (2009), Kincaid (2009), and Gilbertson (2009). In 2011 Diaspora has released a private beta, which is expected to go live in early 2012. The difference from existing platforms is that Diaspora is based on a distributed network with each user hosting his own page, providing complete control. No data will be held centrally. It is a sort of peer-to-peer network around social connections.
- 6.
See article on BBC online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14985494 and the Guardian online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/21/google-plus-20-million-users.
- 7.
YouTube was established in 2005 and later bought by Google. It is accessible at http://youtube.com.
- 8.
Vimeo was established in 2004. It is available at http://vimeo.com.
- 9.
Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. Today Wikipedia is developing in 282 languages and has developed a number of subprojects such as Wikimedia, a repository for shared media items, and Wikimaps, a platform for shared maps. It is accessible online at http://wikipedia.org or the English version of Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org.
- 10.
See also documentation on People in Photo option on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/help/people/.
- 11.
Details on Facebook tags can be found on the help page http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=121363771279781.
- 12.
The feature was introduced on the Facebook blog in August; see http://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post=418175202130.
- 13.
See the website at http://personas.media.mit.edu/personasWeb.html, accessed 2011-06-20 and find project details at http://personas.media.mit.edu/.
- 14.
The platform is accessible at http://planefinder.net/, was set up by Pinkfroot and covers commercial air traffic from across the world based on ADS-B data transmitted by aircraft and received by ground base stations.
- 15.
See for details of the individual API documentation for Facebook on http://developers.facebook.com/docs/, for Twitter on https://dev.Twitter.com/docs, or for Flickr on http://www.flickr.com/services/api/.
- 16.
Google Latitude was launched on February 5, 2009, by Google as a successor to their earlier SMS-based service Dodgeball. See the website of Google Latitude at https://www.google.co.uk/latitude/.
- 17.
Foursquare The company raised $1.35 million (Frommer 2009) in its Series A and $20 million (Ante 2010) in its Series B round, and the user base rose from 60,000 in October 2009 (Wortham 2009) (7 months after launch) to 5 million in December 2010. See details on the Facebook blog About Facebook on http://aboutfoursquare.com/foursquare-hits-five-million-users/ and 8 million in March 2011. See Foursquare tweet from 2011-03-30 on http://aboutfoursquare.com/foursquare-hits-8-million-users/.
- 18.
- 19.
TweetDeck was developed by Iain Dodsworth, starting in 2008. The software runs across platforms on the computer and on the mobile device and lets user manage a range of different social networking accounts such as Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter.
- 20.
HootSuite was launched in 2008.
- 21.
Global Web Index (see it online at http://globalwebindex.net/) is a project by Trendstream, can be found online at http://www.trendstream.net/ a marketing company providing research data. The Global Web Index is one of the biggest Digital Social Network studies updated three times a year providing very detailed data.
- 22.
For more details, refer to http://globalwebindex.net/thinking/new-globalwebindex-infographic/.
- 23.
See details on urbanTick at http://urbantick.blogspot.com/2009/06/movement-mapping-using-flickr.html or on the project web page at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~crandall/photomap/.
- 24.
- 25.
To be found online on Fischer’s Flickr page at http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157623971287575/.
- 26.
See the set on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624209158632/ for more details and all the images produced.
- 27.
- 28.
See the details of the project at http://urbantick.blogspot.com/2010/06/geotaggers-world-atlas.html.
- 29.
See detail of the project online at http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=469716398919.
- 30.
See the project details online at http://incom.org/projekt/1666. The project was developed at the Technical University of Potsdam by Gero Fallisch and Mischa Neubauer, supervised by Till Nagel.
- 31.
See the original post on BLPRNT at http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/goodmorning.
- 32.
See the original post on BLPRNT at http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/just-landed-processing-Twitter-metacarta-hidden-data.
- 33.
MetaCarta was a company providing geographic solutions.
The consumer facing application was acquired by Nokia in early 2010. Details on http://www.metacarta.com/index.htm.
- 34.
Twitter did not communicate its user numbers in detail back in the early days.
- 35.
Conversation taken from BLPRNT original blog post at http://goo.gl/4W5Ns.
- 36.
See Twitter API documentation or details on access level description https://dev.Twitter.com/docs/streaming-api/methods.
- 37.
For access to the full Twitter, steam companies are paying Twitter a lot of money. Ante (2009) reports that Twitter had finalised a deal with Google over $15 million and with Microsoft over $10 million for access to the Firehose service, allowing the tweets to become searchable through the two companies’ search engines Google Search and Bing, respectively. Since then, Twitter has set up Gnip http://gnip.com/ as the official selling point for API-based data streams. Here also a Halfdose with about 50 % of the public messages and a Decahos offering about 10 % of all public messages.
- 38.
The historic centre of Paris covers an area of 10 km diameter from one side of the wall to the other. This is an equivalent of 1 h walk from the centre to reach the gate at the wall to leave the city. In today’s London, 1 h walk will bring you from Tufnell Park in the North to the British Museum in the heart of London, covering about four different identities as demonstrated by Neuhaus et al. (2006).
- 39.
See post on the Twitter blog from 30 June 2011 at http://blog.Twitter.com/2011/06/200-million-tweets-per-day.html or also the TechCrunch post the same day on http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/30/Twitter-3200-million-tweets/.
- 40.
Estimates for geolocated messages vary Neuhaus (2011) a lot and very much depend on the location and the local tweet culture.
- 41.
The Twitter Privacy Page can be accessed online at http://twitter.com/privacy. Previous versions of the Twitter Privacy Policy can be accessed through http://twitter.com/privacy/previous.
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Neuhaus, F. (2015). New City Landscape. In: Emergent Spatio-temporal Dimensions of the City. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09849-4_5
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