User interests in social media sites: An exploration with micro-blogs

Recent technological advances in mobile-based access to social networking platforms and facilities to update information in real{time (e.g. in Facebook) have allowed an individual's online presence to be as ephemeral and dynamic in nature, as her very thoughts and interests. In this context, micro-blogging has been widely adopted by users as an effective means to capture and disseminate their thoughts and actions to a larger audience on a daily basis. Interestingly, daily chatters of a user obtained from her micro-blogs offer a unique information source to analyze and interpret her context in real-time - i.e. interests, intentions,and activities. In this paper, we gather data from the public timeline of Twitter spanning across ten worldwide cities over a period of four weeks. We use this dataset to (a) explore how users express interests in real-time through micro-blogs, and (b) understand how text mining techniques can be applied to interpret real-time context of a user based on her tweets. Initial findings reported herein suggest that social media sites like Twitter constitute a promising source for extracting user context that can be exploited by novel social networking applications. Copyright 2009 ACM.