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Published 22:38, June the 4th, 2009
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Study: Twitter’s close to completely useless

Ten percent of users create 90 percent of content, researchers find

“If you’re trying to get what a representative cross-section of the public is thinking, you’re probably better off staying away from Twitter.”     Piskorski

 

It may seem like everyone — from Ashton to Oprah — uses Twitter, but really it’s a tiny fraction of the people using the fast-growing social network phenomenon who generate nearly all the content, a Harvard study shows.

That makes it hard for companies to use the microblogging site as an accurate gauge of public opinion, the Harvard Business School study showed.

Twitter Inc. is a social networking Web site in which users post messages of 140 characters or less — known as “tweets” — that can be viewed by other users who elect to follow them.

The Twitter bandwagon has been alternately praised and mocked. A segment on “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” presented an overexcited recitation of “Sweet Tweets” from celebrities such as Miley Cyrus: “This line is insane! Am I ever going to get my latte?”

The Harvard study examined public entries of a randomly selected group of 300,000 Twitter users. In May, the researchers studied the content created in the lifetime of the users’ Twitter accounts.

They found that 10 percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content, said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, who led the research. More than half of all Twitter users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days.

REUTERS/METRO