#6 Twitter: What's My *Name* Again?

Networks such as Twitter, Reddit, and Snapchat also have usernames that differ from people’s real names, but they’re still around. This is because their user identities, in contrast to the dead anonymous/pseudonymous networks discussed earlier, are persistent over time and partially tied to real-world identities (e.g. handles like “@realDonaldTrump... See more

“If you're attuned to the thing you're interested in, you see breadcrumbs that are interesting everywhere. People like this tend to be on Twitter. Twitter is a powerful place because it's like a matching algorithm for people like this, but it's everywhere, not just Twitter.”

Twitter, unlike Facebook with its predominant two-way friending, is built on a graph assembled from one-way follows. In theory, this should reduce its exposure to graph design problems. However, it suffers from the same flaw that any interest graph has when built on a social graph. You may be interested in some of a person's interests but not their... See more