Twitter is a broadcast medium - "10% of users generate 90% of content"

[Tzer2]

Judging by our readers' interest in S60 Twitter clients, there are a lot of Twitter fans on All About Symbian, so you may be interested to know that a study of 300,000 Twitter users by Harvard Business School has found that the main pattern of Twitter use isn't as a social network but as a way for a small number of content generators to talk to a large number of listeners. Twitter now has around 30 million users, but 90% of tweets come from just 3 million users, with most users tweeting either once or not at all. If this study is accurate, it would suggest that Twitter isn't a rival to Facebook or SMS but more like an "RSS Lite", and much more a consumer service than a communication service.

Read on in the full article.

[slitchfield]

Can't speak for others, but yes, this is how I use Twitter - broadcasting updates and snippets to a loyal following(!) and picking up interesting updates from a few tech diehards....

I suspect the reason no-one contacts AAS through Twitter is that you have lots of followers but don't follow anyone back. It hardly suggests you are inviting two-way conversation.

Totally agree with "unregistered" who says that the problem with AAS is that they are not following anyone back. I have a rather impressive followership on twitter, follow many people and frequently engage in conversation. But I do *not* follow AAS anymore on Twitter, as their Twitter-account is used as a megaphone, not for real conversation.
There are better ways to read AAS than through the Twitter-interface, therefore "unfollow" ;-)

[phonophiliac]

I also use twitter as an rss feed, and not really as a social medium. Gravity (and WirelessIRC) allows me to copy the url from any tweet which I then paste in opera mini. Works perfectly as a live news feed. I also have numerous searches going for interesting topics (n97, n900, palm pre, etc), which I find easier to keep track of, than googling them everyday.

[Tzer2]

Selig I would agree that Twitter channels like AAS's are generally going to be used for RSS-style one-way communication, but the point the study is making is that channels like AAS now form the majority of Twitter.

The number of Twitter channels where users are actually chatting on equal terms seems to be a very small proportion of the total now, so it isn't really a social network, it's more a news network.

But I do *not* follow AAS anymore on Twitter, as their Twitter-account is used as a megaphone, not for real conversation.

...but most people don't join Twitter for conversation any more, they join just to follow what their favourite website/celebrity/band/etc is doing. As the study points out, most people who sign up to Twitter only ever post one tweet or less.

In fact that's the only way it could work for larger sites, because once you get more than (say) ten thousand followers it would become impossible to answer all of their tweets all the time. Even Stephen Fry, who seems to spend hours a day replying to Tweets, admits that the vast majority of messages he gets now go unanswered simply because there are too many of them. Even if he devoted his entire life to Twitter he wouldn't be able to cope with all the tweets from 550,000 followers (and growing).

The only way a conversation could carry on is if a Twitter channel stays below a certain number of followers, so by definition the most popular channels will be almost entirely one-way traffic.

I only use Twitter anonymously, I haven't registered there or nothing. Have noticed that from twitter you can get faster and easier tech things from some journalists.

I assume(well, have read some where) that tweeting is bigger thing in US, but not big thing in other countrys, like here in Finland.

I personally did just found out of twitter this spring.

I just signed up to Twitter last night and will only be using it to broadcast site updates. As a social networking medium, I don't really see it as that useful, as the last thing I want do do when I'm out and about is to be tied to the phone answering Tweets.