Twitter may be surging in
user
popularity, but a study carried out by the boffins at the
Harvard Business School has revealed that only a small fraction of the micro-blogging service’s online populace actually continues ‘tweeting’ or ‘twittering’ after initial curiosity has faded.
According to the
Harvard study, which was conducted in May and monitored the account activity of 300,000 randomly selected Twitter users, a mere 10 percent of the group emerged as being responsible for the creation of more than 90 percent of its overall content.
Furthermore, study leader and assistant professor of strategy Mikolaj Jan Piskorski revealed that over 50 percent of Twitter users were found to utilise the service’s core 140 character messaging capabilities less than once in every 74 days, while the median number of ‘tweets’ per user is just a single entry.
Other interesting factors thrown up by the study include that male users are nearly twice as likely to ‘follow’ the Twitter activity of other men on the site rather than women, while female users are also more likely to follow men as opposed to other women.
Of course, the sizable drop in user interest once beyond registration can be attributed to
Twitter offering only a
singular messaging capability, whereas the appeal of other social communication platforms, such as Facebook and
MySpace, are bolstered by a wealth of support features.
Specifically, while both Facebook and MySpace have their own personal
messaging systems, they also provide users with the ability to post photos, videos, music, and all manner of downloadable applications, utilities, games and tools.
