Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
The convergence of social and technological networks
Communications of the ACM - Remembering Jim Gray
Human-Computer Interaction
Predicting tie strength with social media
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Surfing a Web of Trust: Reputation and Reciprocity on CouchSurfing.com
CSE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Volume 04
Distance matters: geo-social metrics for online social networks
WOSN'10 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Online social networks
interactions
Suspended accounts in retrospect: an analysis of twitter spam
Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement conference
Next steps for value sensitive design
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City
Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City
Finger on the pulse: identifying deprivation using transit flow analysis
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Whom to mention: expand the diffusion of tweets by @ recommendation on micro-blogging systems
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web
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With the advent of Twitter and other lightweight social-networking services, one might think that it is easier than ever to maintain geographically dispersed, weaker social ties. By contrast, in this study we show that the international Twitter communication landscape is not only still largely predetermined by physical distance, but that it also depends on countries' social, economic, and cultural attributes. We describe a study of an international Twitter mention network of 13 million users across over 100 countries. We show that the Gravity Model, which hypothesizes that the flow between two areas is proportional to their masses (which we approximate using internet penetration) and inversely proportional to the distance between them, is correlated (r=0.68) with the international communication flow. Using this model, along with other social, economic, and cultural variables, we predict the communication volume at Adjusted R2 of $0.80$, with trade, language and racial intolerance especially impacting communication. We discuss the implications of these barriers to communication in the contexts of collaborative work, software design, and recommendation systems.