How does a celebrity differ from you in Twitter? Graph theory answers.

Continuing from the previous post:

We already talked about What is a Graph and have also seen a sample graph from LinkedIn. Now lets see what is the difference between the Facebook Connection Graph and the Twitter Connection Graph.

This can be a graph generated from any Twitter account, who is marked as the dark circle (lets assume its me, now we know from the previous post that we are just a node in this big thing called graph). 

Without priming, lets do some thinking exercise:

1) How many followers do I have?

2) How many people am I following?

If you answered 2 and 3, you can move to the next paragraph. If you answered something else, here is the explanation: 

There are 3 connected nodes with the dark circle - 2 are connected both ways, which means these two are following me and I am following both of them. However the 3rd circle (right bottom) doesn't follow me back yet (the snob). 

Now check the top left node. There are 5 nodes following it. But it is not following anyone. This looks like a celebrity. She has lots of followers, but she doesn't care to follow anyone yet.

Now lets move to Facebook. Here the connection graph is not directed. You assume that a relationship/path/edge gets created only when someone accepts your invitation (partly true, but lets assume for the sake of simplicity). 

Here again let the dark circle be me. I have 7 friends. I have mostly two groups of people, marked in a blue box and a red oval. The people in the blue box are my friends from college, while the people in the red oval are from my office. 

Now that we visualize this graph, how does it help in connecting the dots? Wait for the next post. 

We will talk about the weight of a person in Social platform. It would help you understand why should you get Obama follow you in Twitter, instead of you following him.