Last I heard, Twitter has 200 million users. So that means the top 0.01% of users get 50% of all tweet impressions. Tweet wealth is 100x more concentrated than financial wealth in America.
I doubt it. Spam bots are at the other end of the spectrum, with large numbers of short lived, seldom noticed accounts. This has to be about the Justin Biebers and Charlie Sheens.
This is not terribly surprising, and illustrates why Facebook and Twitter are completely different (and complementary) social networks.
Facebook for keeping tabs on people you know and who know you, i.e. symmetrical relationships.
Twitter turned out to be well suited for keeping track of people you know, but who have no idea who you are, because they are well-known, not you, i.e. asymetrical relationships.
This was my thought as well. And thus, I think it's hard to see how they are in competition with each other, aside from competing for users' attention in general.
Interesting, but not surprising. I believe this is pretty standard human behavior. If you are creating something of value (or perceived value), the "elite" (top X%) will own a large chunk of this value.
This statistic can probably be spun around: I'm sure the 20K elite users have a large % of the total followers of every twitter user.
Similar, tangentially related: About 43% of the financial wealth of America is owned by the top 1% of American households[1].
This isn't 50% of all tweets, it's 50% of all tweet impressions. That is, multiply each user's tweet by the number of users following them when they tweeted, and you'll find that 20K users (likely, people with more than a million followers who tweet with frequency) are half of all these impressions. However, the number of tweets you'd get by following the 20K would be far smaller than the firehose, probably a few hundredths of a percent at most.
I believe you can follow 1000 people who don't follow you. So I think the Grandparent post was saying 20 accounts, each following a different 1000 people = 20K people followed, equals 50% firehose.
Interesting. Was this paper actually published somewhere? I didn't see any listing of a conference name. Am curious what kind of academic conferences for which this paper would be suitable. Would like to check those proceedings out.
And as an aside, I had no idea that Yahoo had a research division.
Yahoo Research people regularly win "Best Paper" awards in web-related conferences. For example, from this page: http://research.yahoo.com/node/3443
"For the third year in a row, Yahoo! Labs took the Best Paper Award at WSDM 2011"
Great example of a company which established a strong user base and a comfortable format to ease in new users. I don't think this article is indicative of twitter's over-rated status in popular culture, I see it as good establishment within popular culture and 20,000 people who love and drive a company. From everything I've learned about startups, that's a growing and winning company.
>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.
