• BBC News , Wednesday, June 10, 2009 3:30 PM

A recent Harvard study of Twitter usage found that just 10% of the microblogging service's users generate more than 90% of the content, and half of all people using the service update their page less than once every 74 days. The researchers also found that most people only ever tweet once.

"Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it," said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School who was part of the team that conducted the study. "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," the team said in a blog post. The Harvard study queried 300,542 users in May 2009. Heil noted that on a typical social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to grow like a weed. According to recent figures from Nielsen Online, visitors to the site increased by 1,382% from 475,000 to seven million between February 2008 and February 2009. The most recent estimates peg the site's usage at around 10 million visitors per month. Facebook, by comparison, has 200 million active users and grew 228% during the same period.

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