Last I heard, Twitter has 200 million users. So that means the top 0.01% of users get 50% of all tweet impressions. Tweet wealth is 100x more concentrated than financial wealth in America.

I'm curious what the graph of active users looks like.

It will look like a zipf distribution. ("Long tail")

If only each impression were monetizable in units...

It's kind of funny how willing the populace is willing to give more power to those who already have the most power.

We are talking volume here, right? This isn't digg mob style... My guess is that those 20K are spam bots?

I doubt it. Spam bots are at the other end of the spectrum, with large numbers of short lived, seldom noticed accounts. This has to be about the Justin Biebers and Charlie Sheens.

This is not terribly surprising, and illustrates why Facebook and Twitter are completely different (and complementary) social networks.

Facebook for keeping tabs on people you know and who know you, i.e. symmetrical relationships.

Twitter turned out to be well suited for keeping track of people you know, but who have no idea who you are, because they are well-known, not you, i.e. asymetrical relationships.

This was my thought as well. And thus, I think it's hard to see how they are in competition with each other, aside from competing for users' attention in general.

Interesting, but not surprising. I believe this is pretty standard human behavior. If you are creating something of value (or perceived value), the "elite" (top X%) will own a large chunk of this value.

This statistic can probably be spun around: I'm sure the 20K elite users have a large % of the total followers of every twitter user.

Similar, tangentially related: About 43% of the financial wealth of America is owned by the top 1% of American households[1].

[1]: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Financial wealth is know to follow a powerlaw distribution, this is probably the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Or maybe not:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html

Please, someone create 20 accounts and follow these users and publish a free 50% firehose.

This isn't 50% of all tweets, it's 50% of all tweet impressions. That is, multiply each user's tweet by the number of users following them when they tweeted, and you'll find that 20K users (likely, people with more than a million followers who tweet with frequency) are half of all these impressions. However, the number of tweets you'd get by following the 20K would be far smaller than the firehose, probably a few hundredths of a percent at most.

It would be interesting, but it wouldn't be a representative 50% sample.

Why bother creating the accounts when you could just use RSS. Polling every minute should be sufficient.

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/259379883.rss

Winning.

Twitter won't allow that.

You could use the api

http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api

but then twitter would come after you if you tried to syndicate the content.

So then you have to deal with Gnip... and thats 10 cents/1000 tweets.

Is there a list somewhere? this sounds like an interesting idea.

20K

I believe you can follow 1000 people who don't follow you. So I think the Grandparent post was saying 20 accounts, each following a different 1000 people = 20K people followed, equals 50% firehose.

The twitter streaming api lets you track 5k users

http://dev.twitter.com/pages/streaming_api

so you'd only need 4 users and 4 clients running on 4 AWS micro instances.

But Twitter will shut you down once they find you syndicating the content.

2000. http://support.twitter.com/articles/66885-i-can-t-follow-peo...

Consumed? That implies that they're actually read (and comprehended rather than downloaded to a stream?), and that they no longer exist afterwards.

Sure, the firehose favors subscriptions, but that's about the only take-away.

I always wonder about zombie consumers, those that are signed up to follow but never really pay attention to the tweets.

Interesting. Was this paper actually published somewhere? I didn't see any listing of a conference name. Am curious what kind of academic conferences for which this paper would be suitable. Would like to check those proceedings out.

And as an aside, I had no idea that Yahoo had a research division.

Yahoo has a very large research group that publishes a lot of great research. Check out their site.

Yahoo Research haven't come up on my radar before either, whereas I've seen reams of material from Microsoft Research and Google.

Here's their Publications page: http://research.yahoo.com/publication

Yahoo Research people regularly win "Best Paper" awards in web-related conferences. For example, from this page: http://research.yahoo.com/node/3443 "For the third year in a row, Yahoo! Labs took the Best Paper Award at WSDM 2011"

I think it's WWW-2011 (it says so in the PDF).

Great example of a company which established a strong user base and a comfortable format to ease in new users. I don't think this article is indicative of twitter's over-rated status in popular culture, I see it as good establishment within popular culture and 20,000 people who love and drive a company. From everything I've learned about startups, that's a growing and winning company.

> From everything I've learned about startups, that's a growing and winning company

Well, except for the bit about having an actual business plan that makes money from something other than soaking investors.

But they'll have that any day now!

This is pretty much what I expected- Pareto distribution of tweets is only natural.

>roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users---where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc; however, bloggers in general rebroadcast more information than the other categories.

nice portrait of the human race.