Topic & metaverse: an explorative analysis

In October 2021 Zuckerberg has drawn the attention of media, businesses and common people on a virtual reality platform called Metaverso, so that its search has become a trend. In this paper, we explored the people thinking in Italy on Twitter by analysis the hashtags. Through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we detected latent topics of hashtags and projected them in an inter-topic distances map which clustered similar topics in two-dimensional space. To study the inter-topic distances, we used the measures of saliency and distinctiveness. Despites the saliency presents similarities between the groups, the distinctiveness denotes that one topic is generalist, based on platforms interconnection, and the other one is specialistic and focused on virtual technologies and virtual economies.