Who's tweeting about AAS225?

Note: You may need to widen your browser window to make this out; sorry.

The page is updated infrequently.

Time range (Pacific): to

How "connected" are the tweeters?

One way of looking at how well information is communicated on Twitter is to look at the "reach" or "exposure" of the message (for an example, see this discussion on reach, by the TweetReach team). In this graph I show how the number of friends and followers of users were distributed for the AAS 225 tweets. The follower distribution is one way of looking at the exposure of the tweets, but I am not a media analyst, so do not know how well this compares to other measures, or how useful it really is; I have also thrown in the distribution in the number of friends just because I have the data.

The data contain the tweets made about AAS 225 (retweets were not included).

Who tweeted the most?

Total number of tweets , of which were made by the following accounts (the cut off to appear is tweets):

The data below shows who has been tweeting about the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, with a cut-off to avoid being drowned by the "long tail" of the distribution. The dark blue bars show the number of retweets made by the user, the light blue (actually steel blue) bar is the number of tweets. If you mouse over the bar then you the user's actual name (or at least whatever text was given to Twitter) and the number of tweets or retweets they made. Clicking on the user's name will take you to their Twitter page.

Please see the data collection page for a description of how the data was collected and processed.

Does tweeting make you more popular?

This is an experimental (i.e. it looks a bit naff) look at whether tweeting about AAS 225 changes your follower count; I got the idea after a conversation with @peterdedmonds about how tweeting about talks can change your follower count. The curves show the number of followers of each of the tweeters in the previous display, as reported by Twitter at the time of each tweet. This means that if you make a tweet that causes lots of people to start - or stop - following you, then the changes will only appear in your later tweets. Note that this is only suggestive, since I have not tried to follow these tweeters when they are not talking about AAS 225, to see what the "normal" change in followers with time looks like.

The scale can be changed between a percentage and the absolute difference; there are two versions of each, to allow you to zoom into different parts of the data.

If you move over a line or name then it should hide all the other data, to make it easier to view that account.

How do verbosity and popularity combine?

Here we look at the number of followers for the top tweeters, as a function of the number of tweets they sent (this includes retweets). This was asked for by Kelle Cruz for the AAS223 analysis. Each account has two circles - connected by a line - showing the number of followers at the first and last tweet; given the scale you can only make out the difference for those with a small number of followers, since the NASA account is a bit of an outlier! If you move over a circle you should see information on that account (the Twitter handle and the number of followers).


This visualization was created using the d3.js JavaScript library.