Heil and Piskorski Twitter Research: Raises New Questions?

In a recent post at Conversation Starter, Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski cite recent research that they conducted analyzing the Twittosphere:

[from New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets - Conversation Starter - HarvardBusiness.org]

Twitter’s usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Other research on Twitter (including a recent study by Nielsen) have shown a high dropout rate, which would match the median score of one tweet for over half of users, which would be a behavior followed by dropping out.

I wonder what the distribution function is for posting once you factor in the likelihood that the bottom half are zombies, and are already checked out in all but name?

Finally, I think the researchers should take a long look at the sorts of tweets being created before assuming that Twitter is a ‘a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.’ First of all it is neither: it is a collection of overlapping networks in which their is a distribution of one:one, one:many, and many:many discussions going on. And many of the posts fall into inherently more social categories than others. For example, retweeting is — among other things — a way of saying that something read is worthy of others attention, and the source is interesting. And group discussions — often involving very popular figures — can have great social benefits for all involved, even those who don’t actively participate, and in a way that is significantly different from one:many publishing models.