  Owing to the popularity of Online Social Media (OSM), Internet users share a
lot of information (including personal) on and across OSM services every day.
For example, it is common to find a YouTube video embedded in a blog post with
an option to share the link on Facebook. Users recommend, comment, and forward
information they receive from friends, contributing in spreading the
information in and across OSM services. We term this information diffusion
process from one OSM service to another as Cross-Pollination, and the network
formed by users who participate in Cross-Pollination and content produced in
the network as \emph{Cross-Pollinated network}. Research has been done about
information diffusion within one OSM service, but little is known about
Cross-Pollination. In this paper, we aim at filling this gap by studying how
information (video, photo, location) from three popular OSM services (YouTube,
Flickr and Foursquare) diffuses on Twitter, the most popular microblogging
service. Our results show that Cross-Pollinated networks follow temporal and
topological characteristics of the diffusion OSM (Twitter in our study).
Furthermore, popularity of information on source OSM (YouTube, Flickr and
Foursquare) does not imply its popularity on Twitter. Our results also show
that Cross-Pollination helps Twitter in terms of traffic generation and user
involvement, but only a small fraction of videos and photos gain a significant
number of views from Twitter. We believe this is the first research work which
explicitly characterizes the diffusion of information across different OSM
services.
