p2pnet news view P2P:- Twitter may not be all that cracked up to be, says a Harvard study.

“Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content,” it found, says the BBC, going on:

“Estimates suggest it now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network. However, the Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days.

“And most people only ever ‘tweet’ once during their lifetime, the researchers found.”

In a sample of 300,542 tweeters, collected in May 2009, 80% are followed by, or follow at least one user, say Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski.

“By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks’ members had at least one friend (when these networks were at a similar level of development),” they say.

“This suggests that actual users (as opposed to the media at large) understand how Twitter works.”

Men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, but men have 15% more followers than women and also have more reciprocated relationships in which two users follow each other, says the report, going on »»»

This “follower split” suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we cross-referenced users’ “real names” against a database of 40,000 strongly gendered names.

Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same rate.

On a typical online social network, however, “most of the activity is focused around women – men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know,” say Heil and Piskorski, adding:

“Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women. We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.).”

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Harvard study – New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets, June 1, 2009