Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

The way in which social conventions emerge in com- munities has been of interest to social scientists for decades. Here we report on the emergence of a particular social convention on Twitter, the way to indicate a tweet is being reposted and attributing the content to its source. Initially, different variations are invented and spread through the Twitter network. The inventors and early adopters are well-connected, active, core members of the Twitter community. The diffusion networks of these conventions are dense and highly clustered, so no single user was critical to the adoption of the conventions. Despite being invented at different times and having different adoption rates, only two variations come to be widely adopted. In this paper we describe this process in detail, highlighting insights and raising ques- tions about the emergence of social conventions.

Meeyoung Cha is an assistant professor at Graduate School of Culture Technology in KAIST. Meeyoung received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from KAIST in 2008. Previously, she was a post-doctral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany. Her research interests are in the analysis of large-scale online social networks with emphasis the spread of information, moods, and user influence. She received the best paper award from Usenix/ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference 2007 for her work on YouTube. Her recent work on the user influence in Twitter has been featured on New York Times websites and Harvard Business Review's research blog. Her research has been published in leading journals and conferences including PLoS One, Information Sciences, WWW, and ICWSM.