I have been fascinated by Twitter for at least a couple of years. The service can be defined as a free, one-to-many social networking system. Messages are confined to 140 characters but allow embedding in messages of links to web resources, thus expanding the information content of the tweets. Twitter provides value in different ways for its subscribers. I carefully select people and organizations to follow who then provide me rapid and easy access to breaking healthcare and medical science news. I "unfollow" those who post personal data that I find irrelevant and distracting. Many of my blog posts are based on ideas that I first discover on Twitter. Here's an extract of an article discussing the rapid growth of the growth and estimated value of the company (see: Twitter valued in billions as popularity climbs):
More than 25 billion "tweets" were fired off during the past 12 months, with Twitter adding 100 million new accounts during that same time frame, the firm's chief executive Dick Costolo said in an online post. Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers (KPCB) headed a new round of Twitter funding, which technology blog AllThingsDigital said tallied 200 million dollars. The investment was reportedly based on Twitter, a private firm with 350 employees, being valued at 3.7 billion dollars....Costolo, whose Web content distribution company Feedburner was purchased by Google in 2007, has been at the forefront of efforts to begin monetizing Twitter since he joined the company last year. Twitter, which allows users to fire off messages of 140 characters or less known as "tweets," has enjoyed skyrocketing popularity since it was launched in 2006 by Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone.
I came across another news item that discusses some of the changes in usage patterns of Twitter during 2010 and provides a window about how others use it in comparison to myself (see: How Twitter Users Changed in 2010). Here is an excerpt from this article:
Twitter signed on more than 100 million new users in 2010. As they get acclimated to the information network, significant changes in usage are bound to take place. That’s exactly what social media monitoring company Sysomos found when comparing Twitter usage in 2010 to 2009. What stands out the most is that more Twitter (Twitter) users have much higher follower and following counts. Twenty-one percent of Twitter users now follow more than 100 people — that’s up from 7% last year — and 16% now have more than 100 followers, according to Sysomos, which looked at over a billion tweets from 20 million users in 2010 and compared them against data gathered in 2009. Twitter users in 2010 were much more likely to provide a bio (69%), detailed name (73%), location (82%) and website URL (44%) as part of their public profiles....Sysomos also found that 80.6% of Twitter users have made fewer than 500 tweets, which likely points to the relative newbie status of the average Twitter user. Also noteworthy is that 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets.
Here is what I find the most interesting about this information: 21% of Twitter users now follow more than 100 people...and 16% now have more than 100 followers. Also, 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets. By way of comparison, I personally follow 157 people and have 395 followers. I have accounted for 829 tweets, mainly a reposting of Lab Soft News blog notes. I take all of this of this to mean that a relatively large proportion of the top quarter of Twitter accounts are "professional & business" or "celebrity" users as opposed to those who are communicating with friends for personal and social reasons. These former categories of users are more likely, it seems to me, to post tweets frequently and over the long haul. They are trying to reach a broader audience.
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