Things that make you go "hmmmm" - HBR Twitter study

A study of Twitter usage by HBR has some interesting snippets:

We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.

This is a rather interesting difference, I wonder how much of this is early adopter based and it will revert to more standard patterns over time. As HBR points out, this is different to other social nets which are more profile than chat based:

On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women.

Sounds like the standard date site (Which in fact it is - most social networks boil down into date sites, human social motives and actions being fairly predictable)

We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.).

We suspect that this is because Twitter is more chat based. It may still resolve to a date site in the end, but it is clearly carrying out other information tasks as well.

More curious though is the HBR conclusions based around the usage patterns:

A Typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits

So Twitter has a higher power curve than most social nets (see graph above). I must admit I'm surprised, if I were to hazard a guess its that the transaction costs of a twt is lower, so heavier users thus use it more. The conclusion HBR comes to.....

In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

....just does not tally with my experience. My experience is that there is a cadre of users - quite a large one - that use Twitter as a sort of IM-cum-chat system, rather than being passive recipients of sleb broadcasters. I think HBR should look at the actual dynamics of conversation, I suspect there is far more to and froing than they are assuming.

Update - good point in comments from Ben Ellis, ie HBR probably haven't stripped out all the "listening post" sites that say nothing but follow thousands.