Rise and Decline of Twitter or was it just a myth?

After infamous 2008 Mumbai attacks, the world heard about a new phenomenon - Twitter. After Hudson plane crash, the world believed in Twitter's omnipotence. Well, the Internet has killed print newspapers, and Twitter would kill TV channels and news agencies - such were the prophecies. However ...

This is the word that I most like - "However" ;)

After I signed up for Twitter and started to follow some Twitter users that I know, I noticed that something is not right - as if there is an in-built mechanism of self-destruction in Twitter. Let me explain what I mean.

The more people sign up for Twitter, the more tweets it generates. The more people become active tweeters, the more users become addicted to tweeting, and the more people you start to follow - the more cumbersome becomes the Twitter. The flow of information rises dramatically, it runs out of control, it becomes so enormous that you can catch only glimpses of it. It is a real information explosion, but only positive explosion I know was Big Bang.

Thus, if any mechanisms to systematize or contain the information flow aren't invented, there could come a shaky end of Twitter in upcoming years - it can have a spectacular fall as was its rise. However, if such a mechanism is invented and put into commission, it can limit and control the information flow which is, obviously, a kind of censorship.

Thus, this is what I call an in-built mechanism of self-destruction in Twitter.

However, reading about the latest study concerning Twitter, I started to have some doubts. What if Twitter never had a spectacular rise? Was Twitter such a powerful phenomenon in fact? Or was it just an extraordinary myth? A myth that deceived us and continues to deceive? As a post-modernist would put here - Is there any Twitter there? Here is an excerpt:

A tiny fraction of those who use the fast-growing social network phenomenon Twitter generate nearly all the content, a Harvard study shows. [...]

The Harvard study examined public entries of a randomly selected group of 300,000 Twitter users. The researchers studied in May the content created in the lifetime of the users' Twitter accounts.

It found that 10 percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content, said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, who led the research. More than half of all Twitter users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days.

The median number of lifetime "tweets" per user is just one, according the research.

Companies are increasingly turning to Twitter to improve their understanding of how consumers view them, he said.

But some users are far more active and vocal than others, limiting information gleaned from messages on the site, said Piskorski, an assistant professor of strategy at Harvard Business School.

"If you're trying to get what a representative cross-section of the public is thinking, you're probably better off staying away from Twitter," he said in an interview.

However, maybe there is a hope and I am not a prophet :)

Follow me in Twitter, I assure you - I generate few tweets and won't bother you :)