New research by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski  over at Harvard Business School suggests that the old 80/20 rule is alive and well on Twitter – They surveyed 300,542 users, during May 2009 and found, among other things that:

10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content. (This is compared with Wikipedia where the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits)

Over 50% of the sampled people updated their page less than 5 times a year (i.e. less than once every 74 days)

The statistic I’d like to know is ‘What percentage of the very high (and much disputed) number of daily Tweets sent  is high value-add content  and what % is distracting, albeit perhaps worthy noise?

Check out the Harvard working paper behind this information here:
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html

I’m curious, what’s your favourite 80/20 take at the moment? Add your comment below.