Comparing Tweets and Tags for URLs

The free-form tags available from social bookmarking sites such as Delicious have been shown to be useful for a number of purposes and could serve as a cheap source of metadata about URLs on the web. Unfortunately recent years have seen a reduction in the popularity of such sites, however at the same time microblogging sites such as Twitter have exploded in popularity. On these sites users submit short messages (or “tweets”) about what they are currently reading, thinking and doing and often post URLs. In this work we look into the similarity between top tags drawn from Delicious and high-frequency terms from tweets to ascertain whether Twitter data could serve as a useful replacement for Delicious. We investigate how these terms compare with web page content, whether or not top Twitter terms converge and determine if the terms are mostly descriptive (and therefore useful) or if they are mostly expressing sentiment or emotion. We discover that provided a large number of tweets are available referring to a chosen URL then the top terms drawn from these tweets are similar to Delicious tags and could therefore be used for similar purposes.