Despite how many how many people you follow on Twitter, chances are your timeline is heavily populated by the Tweets of a handful of people. According to a study from Cornell University and Yahoo! Research, the same could be said for the entire Twitterverse.
The study showed that out of the 140 million tweets posted each day, around half of them are created by only 20,000 of Twitter's 200 million user base. The researchers called that small group, the "elite" class of Twitter.
That elite class primarily consists of four groups of Tweeters: celebrities, media outlets, organizations, and blogs. The study also found that the elite Twitter accounts focus on others within their own group. So, celebrities would follow and tweet to other celebrities, and so on.
More interesting was how the lifespan of tweets varied between each elite group. Tweets from blogs made up a large portion of the long-lived tweets while tweets from media were among the most short-lived.
However, this information is nothing new. Back in 2009, a Harvard study showed that 10% of Twitter's users produced almost 90% of all tweets.
Next time you get fed up with that dude who tweets every 25 seconds, completely filling up your time line—relax and know that you're not alone.
[Huffington Post via Switched]
