Social Big Data Mining

Social Media

Social media are indispensable elements of social big data applications. In

this chapter, we will fi rst classify social media into several categories and

explain the features of each category in order to better understand what

social media are. Then we will select important media categories from a

viewpoint of analysis required for social big data applications, address

representative social media included in each category, and describe the

characteristics of the social media, focusing on the statistics, structures, and

interactions of social media as well as the relationships with other similar

social media.

1.1 What are Social Media?

Generally, a social media site consists of an information system as its

platform and its users on the Web. The system enables the user to perform

direct interactions with it. The user is identifi ed by the system along

with other users as well. Two or more users constitute explicit or implicit

communities, that is, social networks. The user in social media is generally

called an actor in the context of social network analysis. By participating in

the social network as well as directly interacting with the system, the user

can enjoy services provided by the social media site.

More specifi cally, social media can be classifi ed into the following

categories based on the service contents.

• Blogging: Services in this category enable the user to publish

explanations, sentiments, evaluations, actions, and ideas about certain

topics including personal or social events in a text in the style of a diary.

• Micro blogging: The user describes a certain topic frequently in shorter

texts in micro blogging. For example, a tweet, an article of Twitter,

consists of at most 140 characters.

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2 Social Big Data Mining

• SNS (Social Network Service): Services in this category literally support

creating social networks among users.

• Sharing service: Services in this category enable the user to share movies,

audios, photographs, and bookmarks.

• Video communication: The users can hold a meeting and chat with other

users using live videos as services in this category.

• Social search: Services in this category enable the user to refl ect the

likings and opinions of current search results in the subsequent

searches. Other services allow not only experts but also users to directly

reply to queries.

• Social news: Through services in this category the user can contribute

news as a primary source and can also re-post and evaluate favorite

news items which have already been posted.

• Social gaming: Services in this category enable the user to play games

with other users connected by SNS.

• Crowd sourcing: Through services in this category, the user can outsource

a part or all of his work to outside users who are capable of doing the

work.

• Collaboration: Services in this category support cooperative work among

users and they enable the users to publish a result of the cooperative

work.

1.2 Representative Social Media

In consideration of user volumes and the social impact of media in the present

circumstances, micro blogging, SNS, movie sharing, photograph sharing,

and collaboration are important categories of social big data applications,

where social media data are analyzed and the results are utilized　as one of

big data sources. The profi les (i.e., features) of representative social media

in each category will be explained as well as generic Web, paying attention

to the following aspects which are effective for analysis:

• Category and foundation

• Numbers

• Data structures

• Main interactions

• Comparison with similar media

• API

1.2.1 Twitter

(1) Category and foundation

Twitter [Twitter 2014] [Twitter-Wikipedia 2014] is one of the platform

services for micro blogging founded by Jack Dorsey in 2005 (see Fig. 1.1).