Liao, Yang, Masud Moshtaghi, Bo Han, Shanika Karunasekera, Ramamohanarao Kotagiri, Timothy Baldwin, Aaron Harwood and Philippa Pattison (to appear) Mining Micro-Blogs: Opportunities and Challenges, In Ajith Abraham and Aboul Ella Hassanien (eds.) Social Networks: Computational Aspects and Mining, Springer

This chapter investigates whether and how micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter messages can be harnessed to obtain valuable information. The interesting characteristics of micro-blogging services, such as being user oriented, provide opportunities for different applications to use the content of these sites to their advantage. However, the same characteristics become the weakness of these sites when it comes to data modeling and analysis of the messages. These sites contains very large amount of unstructured, noisy with false or missing data which make the task of data mining difficult. This chapter first reviews some of the potential applications of the micro-messaging services and then provides some insight into different challenges faced by data mining applications. Later in the chapter, characteristics of a real-data collected from the Twitter are analysed. At the end of chapter, application of micro-blogging services is shown by three different case studies.