Hello!
As Tony notes, you may have a brief window to run 234 before the 11th of June. Good luck!
I agree that the followers edge is useful and the loss of this data damages many research efforts. Sadly, I doubt that will change Twitter's decision.
Your research design question is challenging: what is a sufficient sample for generalizable results? Without broader understanding of the population (which requires that we have all of Twitter's data) it is hard to validate that any sample is representative.
That said, I think there are research contributions to be made based on simply finding and documenting particular patterns in Twitter. Like Darwin on the Beagle, I think we are in the phase of data collection and initial steps towards taxonomy. If your data can demonstrate various patterns of diffusion, I think knowing the rate of incidence of each diffusion pattern is a great goal but not essential. I would be interested in seeing examples of different ways diffusion occurs. For example, there is a great study of the diffusion of breaking news: http://blog.socialflow.com/post/5246404319/breaking-bin-laden-visualizing-the-power-of-a-single
Regards,
Marc
As Tony notes, you may have a brief window to run 234 before the 11th of June. Good luck!
I agree that the followers edge is useful and the loss of this data damages many research efforts. Sadly, I doubt that will change Twitter's decision.
Your research design question is challenging: what is a sufficient sample for generalizable results? Without broader understanding of the population (which requires that we have all of Twitter's data) it is hard to validate that any sample is representative.
That said, I think there are research contributions to be made based on simply finding and documenting particular patterns in Twitter. Like Darwin on the Beagle, I think we are in the phase of data collection and initial steps towards taxonomy. If your data can demonstrate various patterns of diffusion, I think knowing the rate of incidence of each diffusion pattern is a great goal but not essential. I would be interested in seeing examples of different ways diffusion occurs. For example, there is a great study of the diffusion of breaking news: http://blog.socialflow.com/post/5246404319/breaking-bin-laden-visualizing-the-power-of-a-single
Regards,
Marc