10 Psychological Insights From Studies on Twitter

Over at PsyBlog, University College London researcher Jeremy Dean collects 10 of his favorite insights from the small pool of scientific research conducted about Twitter. Some of the lessons are obvious ("most tweets are babble"), some are not ("20 per cent are 'informers', 80 per cent are 'meformers'"). It's a concise roundup of current scholarship on the microblogging service:

There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves--double the figure from the previous year (Pew, 2009).

So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what is so engaging about all those little textual transmissions?

Read the full story at PsyBlog.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/08/10-psychological-insights-from-studies-on-twitter/61328/