Mining Twitter using cloud computing

Today Social Networks have an undeniable impact on how users communicate search and share data online. This data has opened up new venues of research on sociology. Unfortunately mining and analyzing this large amount of data can be a difficult task and expensive in terms of computational resources. With the advent of cloud computing, data mining and analysis can be made more accessible due to its cost-effective computational resources. As a source of large data, we propose to use data from Twitter considering both its popularity and the open nature of its API. A large study of information propagation within Twitter reveals that a majority of users are passive information consumers and do not forward the content to even their own network. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate the usage of cloud computing platforms as a possible solution for mining and analyzing large amounts of data, while inspecting the Retweet Graph of a user to calculate their influence within their network.