On Twitter they are published110 million messages every day, which are spread among around 200 million users. Researchers from Cornell University (USA) and fromYahoo! Research have studied theflow of that huge amount of information on the popular ‘microblogging’ networkwith the aim of shedding a little light on how tweets influence. To do this, the researchers divided users into 5 categories: celebrities, media, organizations, blogs and ordinary users.
In this way they have come to the conclusion that50 percent of the most “consumed” tweets are generated by only 20,000 usersbelonging to a“elite”. The media are the ones that produce the most information, but famous people are the most followed and their messages the most “retweeted”. In factonly 15% of the information received by ordinary users comes from the media.
The study also highlights that the ‘twiteros’ are grouped to interact between users with the same interests or similar activities, which are the ones they pay attention to: “celebrities listen to famous people, bloggers listen to bloggers, etc”, they say the authors. As for the redistribution of information, bloggers in general are the ones who redistribute the most messages compared to other users. Regarding the lifetime of a message on Twitter, the study shows that the URLs generated by the media are the ones that last the least time, whileURLs generated by bloggers are the longest-lived. The contents that are ‘retweeted’ for more days are those related tovideos, music and books.
Regarding thesubject categories, theinternational Newsthey are the ones that receive the most attention and syndication, followed by national news, business information and sports. TheHealth, thetechnologyand thesciencethey occupy, respectively, the fifth, sixth and seventh positions.
The conclusions of the study will be officially presented at theInternational World Wide Web Conference (WWW ?11), held at the end of March.
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