The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Bursty and Hierarchical Structure in Streams
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
Neo-tribes: the power and potential of online communities in health care
Communications of the ACM - Personal information management
Group formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and evolution
Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Preferential behavior in online groups
WSDM '08 Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
SCOPE: easy and efficient parallel processing of massive data sets
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
A life-cycle perspective on online community success
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Research Note---The Impact of Community Commitment on Participation in Online Communities
Information Systems Research
On participation in group chats on Twitter
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
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We report on a new kind of group conversation on Twitter that we call a group chat. These chats are periodic, synchronized group conversations focused on specific topics and they exist at a massive scale. The groups and the members of these groups are not explicitly known. Rather, members agree on a hashtag and a meeting time (e.g, 3pm Pacific Time every Wednesday) to discuss a subject of interest. Topics of these chats are numerous and varied. Some are support groups, for example, post-partum depression and mood disorder groups. Others are about a passionate interest: topics include skiing, photography, movies, wine and foodie communities. We develop a definition of a group that is inspired by how sociologists define groups and present an algorithm for discovering groups. We prove that our algorithms find all groups under certain assumptions. While these groups are of course known to the people who participate in the discussions, what we do not believe is known is the scale and variety of groups. We provide some insight into the nature of these groups based on over two years of tweets. Finally, we show that group chats are a growing phenomenon on Twitter and hope that reporting their existence propels their growth even further.