Jack Dorsey rejoins Twitter : Returning to the nest

/jack_dorsey_rejoins_twitter

  • Jack Dorsey rejoins #Twitter: Returning to the nest | The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/03/jack_dorsey_rejoins_twitter

    A recent study by researchers at Yahoo! found that just 20,000 users were producing roughly 50% of all tweets. If it is to flourish in future, Twitter will need to convince many more people to send tweets, not just read those generated by a bunch of über-prolific types.

    • L’étude en question. Intéressante, notamment la partie en rapport avec les médias (la « two-step theory »).

      Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo ! Research
      http://research.yahoo.com/pub/3386

      We study several longstanding questions in media communications research, in the context of the microblogging service Twitter, regarding the production, flow, and consumption of information. To do so, we exploit a recently introduced feature of Twitter---known as Twitter lists---to distinguish between elite users, by which we mean specifically celebrities, bloggers, and representatives of media outlets and other formal organizations, and ordinary users. Based on this classification, we find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter---roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users---where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc; however, bloggers in general rebroadcast more information than the other categories. Next we re-examine the classical ``two-step flow’’ theory of communications, finding considerable support for it on Twitter, but also some interesting differences. Third, we find that URLs broadcast by different categories of users or containing different types of content exhibit systematically different lifespans. And finally, we examine the attention paid by the different user categories to different news topics.

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      In particular, we find that although audience attention has indeed fragmented among a wider pool of content producers than classical models of mass media, attention remains highly concentrated, where roughly 0.05% of the population accounts for almost half of all posted URLs.