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The Median Twitterer

From The Harvard Business Review:

Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. 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 ⁱⁱ. 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.

Twitter catches a lot of flak for reasons of various legitimacy, but I will say that as an occasional user of their service, I have to agree with this one-to-many outlook. People are fundamentally more interested knowing that they've been heard than hearing.

On a related note, David Heinemeier Hansson (37 Signals) was interviewed in Forbes on his controversial opinions regarding web 2.0 companies:

Hansson would say that YouTube's financial hole is there not despite its popularity but because of it. When you give away your products, users are a cost center instead of a profit center, and so each new one puts you further behind. Facebook is spending so much money to store users' pictures that it's not clear that the company can ever make a profit.

A business model where each new user is a profit center? Crazy! Though it seems lack of a competent business model hasn't prevented David from embracing Twitter.

Labels: 37 Signals, Busines, Business Strategy, Forbes, Harvard, Twitter