Twitter loses its glitter

Less than a week into his tenure as new host of NBC's venerable The Tonight Show, we know this much: Conan O'Brien does not care for social networking. O'Brien followed Tuesday's opening monologue with a scathing satire of Twitter, mocking the hype around the service and deriding banal tweets from celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and hillbilly teen-queen Miley Cyrus. A night later, he and sidekick Andy Richter resurrected their crowd-pleasing Late Night prognostication skit "In the Year 2000"--now updated to "In the Year 3000" because it's The Tonight Show and, well, because it's 2009--and forecasted that YouTube, Twitter and Facebook will soon merge to form a new social networking service named YouTwitFace. O'Brien's not the only celeb with a Twitter axe to grind: Micro-blogging poster boy Kutcher and wife Demi Moore both vowed to stop tweeting in the event Twitter.com follows through on a rumored reality television show that would unleash everyday people on the trail of celebrities. St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa is even suing Twitter, alleging an unauthorized page that used his name to poke fun at drunken driving and two Cardinals pitchers who died damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.

And so the inevitable Twitter backlash begins, led by the same showbiz contingent whose adoration for the service accelerated its penetration into mainstream culture. Just how "mainstream" Twitter has become is a matter for debate, however, and new evidence suggests that it's not nearly as big a deal as the media buzz would suggest. A May 2009 study conducted by the Harvard Business Review reports that the top 10 percent of Twitter users are responsible for more than 90 percent of all tweets, with the typical Twitter user averaging just one tweet throughout the lifetime of the account--that means more than half of Twitter users tweet less than once every 74 days. Harvard Business Review concludes that makes Twitter more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication platform, adding that on a typical online social network, the top 10 percent of users account for just 30 percent of total content production--instead, Twitter more closely resembles user-generated digital encyclopedia Wikipedia, where the top 15 percent of most prolific editors generate 90 percent of all edits.

The Harvard Business Review study also pinpoints some fascinating gender trends within the Twitter community. While females account for about 55 percent of total Twitter users, men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users and tweet at the same rate--however, men enjoy an average of 15 percent more followers than women, and also lead in reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. HBR contends the "follower split" suggests women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. No less interesting, the average male Twitter is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman, while the average woman is 25 percent more likely to follow a man than a woman. The opposite is true across rival social sites, where men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, women follow content produced by women they know, and men receive comparatively little attention from either sex. Report authors Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski admit they're unable to determine whether the pattern indicates men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter that much more compelling than on other social networks or whether men simply find the content produced by women less compelling in the absence of photo sharing and detailed biographies. Nor can they answer the biggest question: Whether Twitter's demographic quirks and differences are enough to legitimize the service as a viable, longterm rival to Facebook and MySpace, or if tweeting is little more than a fad--the CB radio of the 21st century. Over and out. -Jason