What are Twitterers doing? Well, 90 percent of Tweets are from 10 percent of the registered users, according to a recent study by the Harvard Business School. And the median number of Tweets per user? One--the loneliest number. So Twitterers, on average, seem to be doing one thing, once.
According to the researchers, a small group of dedicated users is sending out most of the "one-liners" on Twitter.
On a typical online social network, the top 10 percent of users account for 30 percent of all production, the researchers said on a Harvard Business School blog. "To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue--Wikipedia. There, the top 15 percent of the most prolific editors account for 90 percent of Wikipedia's edits," wrote the researchers. So, even though Wikipedia is not a communications tool, its contributors are more spread out than Twitter's--which is supposed to function as a communications tool.
On Twitter, users can opt to simply "follow" and read Tweets, rather than write them. Therefore, the Harvard researchers note, Twitter "resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network."
Of the sample of 300,542 users, collected last month, 80 percent are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 percent to 65 percent of other online social networks' members had at least one "friend" when these networks were at a similar level of development.
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