| Twitter has become a new age very important communication tool with a very large spectrum area that goes from personal to business and mass media. That’s why researchers Shaomei Wu from Cornell University and Winter Mason, Jake Hofman, and Duncan Watts from Yahoo decided to take a closer look on who says what to whom and who listens to whom on Twitter. The research revealed that only 20,000 Twitter users, called the “elite users”, generate almost half of all the tweets out there. The researchers classified these users into four categories: celebrities, bloggers, media outlets, and organizations. This classification was mostly based on the frequency these users show up on Twitter. They’ve also made a list of the top 5 users in each of these categories. The celebrities category listed aplusk, ladygaga, TheEllenShow, taylorswift13, and Oprah, the media category included cnnbrk, nytimes, asahi, BreakingNews, and TIME in its top 5, the organizations were best represented by google, Starbucks, twitter, joinred, and ollehkt, whereas mashable, problogger, kibeloco, naosalvo, and dooce were listed as the 5 most active bloggers. Although the media outlets were represented as the most active users on Twitter, it appears that only 15% of common users receive tweets directly from the media. This means either that the tweets are not directly received from the media, but come as retweets, or that people simply find other sources of information more attractive. However, the most relevant part of the study was not that these categories generate the largest fraction of tweets, but that these four main categories have the tendency to be exclusive, meaning that they mostly tweet and retweet within their own circle or category. It is a basic tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others, and in fact the research shows that celebrities mostly interact with other celebrities, and media actors consume information from other media actors and tweet in the same circle. There is however a small exception when it comes to organizations, which seem to pay more attention to bloggers than to themselves: “Bloggers, unlike those in other categories, are more likely to retweet information outside their own categories, reflecting the "characterization of bloggers as recyclers and filters of information."
The study also found that world news, U.S. news and sports news represented a large part of the content found on Twitter. When taking a closer look at the lifespan of the content on Twitter, researchers have found that media URLs usually have a short lifespan, whereas content initiated by bloggers usually has a long lifespan. However, the URLs with the longest lifespan are unsurprisingly represented by videos and music content, which are tweeted and retweeted over and over again.
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