Portraying User Life Status from Microblogging Posts

Microblogging services provide a novel and popular communication scheme for Web users to share information and express opinions by publishing short posts, which usually reflect the users’ daily life. We can thus model the users’ daily status and interests according to their posts. Because of the high complexity and the large amount of the content of the microblog users’ posts, it is necessary to provide a quick summary of the users’ life status, both for personal users and commercial services. It is non-trivial to summarize the life status of microblog users, particularly when the summary is conducted over a long period. In this paper, we present a compact interactive visualization prototype, LifeCircle, as an efficient summary for exploring the long-term life status of microblog users. The radial visualization provides multiple views for a given microblog user, including annual topics, monthly keywords, monthly sentiments, and temporal trends of posts. We tightly integrate interactive visualization with novel and state-of-the-art microblogging analytics to maximize their advantages. We implement LifeCircle on Sina Weibo, the most popular microblogging service in China, and illustrate the effectiveness of our prototype with various case studies. Results show that our prototype makes users nostalgic and makes them reminiscent about past events, which helps them to better understand themselves and others.