Interest assortativity in Twitter

Assortativity is the preference for a person to relate to others who are someway similar. This property has been widely studied in real-life social networks in the past and, more recently, great attention is devoted to study various forms of assortativity also in online social networks, being aware that it does not suffice to apply past scientific results obtained in the domain of real-life social networks. One of the aspects not yet analyzed in online social networks is interest assortativity, that is the preference for people to share the same interest (e.g., sport, music) with their friends. In this paper, we study this form of assortativity on Twitter, one of the most popular online social networks. After the introduction of the background theoretical model, we analyze Twitter, discovering that users clearly show interest assortativity. Beside the theoretical assessment, our result leads to identify a number of interesting possible applications.