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If you are trying to figure out twitter as a social network this is interesting

A man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. contrary to typical online social networks. 

New Twitter Research also shows  10 % of Twitter Users Account for 90% of Tweets As Twitter is still in it’s infancy, it could be interesting to see who the early technology adopters?

Here is the May 2009 Harvard study by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski

Study’s highlights include:

1. Unlike the other social networks where 60 to 65% of their members had at least one friend, 80% of all Twitter users are followed by or follow at least one user.

2. Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.

3. Although both men and women tweet at the same rate, an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. On the contrary, on a typical online social network, most activity is focused around women.

4. Twitter’s usage patterns are quite different from a typical online social network. The study found a typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. In other words, over half of Twitter users tweet less than once every 74 days.

5. The top 10% prolific Twitter users make 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, 10% of users contribute only 30% of all content.

 

“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.”, was the authors conclusion.

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