Cross-Pollination of Information in Online Social Media: A Case Study on Popular Social Networks

Owing to the popularity of Online Social Media (OSM), Internet users share a lot of information on and across OSM services every day. Users recommend, comment, and forward information they receive from friends, contributing in spreading the information in and across OSM services. We term this information diffusion process from one OSM service to another as Cross-Pollination, and the network formed by users who participate in Cross-Pollination and content produced in the network as Cross-Pollinated network. Research has been done about information diffusion within one OSM service, but little is known about Cross-Pollination. We aim at filling this gap by studying how information from three popular OSM services (You Tube, Flickr and Foursquare) diffuses on Twitter, the most popular microblogging service. Our results show that Cross-Pollinated networks follow temporal and topological characteristics of Twitter. Furthermore, popularity of information on source OSM (You Tube, Flickr and Foursquare) does not imply its popularity on Twitter.