Tweet-to-do
A large handful of 'elite' Twitter users are creating around half of all tweets shared on the micro blogging website, according to new research.
Approximately 50 percent of all tweets that are shared and read on Twitter are created by an ‘elite' group of 20,000 users, in spite of Twitter notching up an impressive 200 million registered accounts, Yahoo! Research said.
The study looked at the production, flow and consumption of information on Twitter and researchers studied 260 million tweets between July 2009 to March 2010. Crucially they also used Twitter Lists to sift out celebs, bloggers and representatives of media outlets plus organisations from ‘ordinary' users to get a better look at how Twitter really functions.
By making such distinctions, the research found that while the media churns out the most tweets, unsurprisingly celebrities are the most followed by ‘normal' twitter users.
It also discovered ‘significant homophily' within categories as celebs listen to other celebs, while bloggers listen to other bloggers etc. However, as one might expect, bloggers re-tweet or re-broadcast more information than any other category of Tweeple, it said.
One researcher told The Telegraph: "Information flows have not become egalitarian by any means," as the research found that plenty of users follow less people than follow themselves, arguably making it less ‘social' than Facebook.
"The Twitter follower graph, in other words, does not conform to the usual characteristics of social networks, which exhibit much higher reciprocity and far less skewed degree distributions, but instead resembles more the mixture of one-way mass communications and reciprocated interpersonal communications," the researcher reportedly said.
Twitter turned 5 this month and announced that a staggering one billion tweets are sent every week; an average of 140m every day.
While the site is believed to have 200 million registered accounts, it is not known how many people tweet regularly and how many of the total are completely dormant.
