Twitter : Social Network or News Media

This year's WWW conference has an interesting paper by four researchers from KAIST, KOREA titled "What is Twitter, a social network or news media? The paper has lots of really interesting insights.

• Structure of Twitter is not similar to typical human social networks having a 'non-power law' follower distribution, short effective diameter and low reciprocity.


• The top ranked users calculated using the number of retweets is different from the users with the largest the number of followers.


• Any retweeted tweet spreads very quickly irrespective of the number of followers of the original tweet.


• Subset of users with reciprocated links display the characterstics of a social network including homophily.


• Majority (85%) of trending topics are headlines or persistent news in nature.

So it seems there are a subset of users in Twitter who use it for communicating with people in their network while a larger portion of users use it just as a source of news. And similar to sites like Digg collective intelligence (in the form of retweets) decides which information is the most important.

However Twitter is very unlike a traditional news media in that it's main utility is as a distribution medium. Unlike the traditional media or blogs Twitter cannot be the main source of original content.