The anatomy of a Twitter conversation, visualized with R by David Smith.
From the post:
If you’re a Twitter user like me, you’re probably familiar with the way that conversations can easily by tracked by following the #hashtag that participants include in the tweets to label the topic. But what causes some topics to take off, and others to die on the vine? Does the use of retweets (copying another users tweet to your own followers) have an impact?
I don’t think the visualization answers the questions about why some topics take off wile other don’t. Nor as far as I can tell, does it suggest any conclusion for the retweet question.
To answer the retweet question, the followers of each person would have to be known and their discussion of a retweet measured. Yes?
Still, interesting visualization technique and one that you may find handy in a current or future project.