Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time

27 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

Micro-Messaging Today

As the biggest and oldest service in micro-messaging,

Twitter can help us understand where the medium

is going. Here we’ll look at Twitter as a bellwether for

larger developments.

Twitter and other micro-blogs were originally used

primarily by individuals to publish personal status

updates. While companies and media organizations are

starting to embrace Twitter, individual Twitterers—rather

than corporate accounts—continue to attract the most

followers. As you can see in the graph below, when we

rank Twitterers by their number of followers, individu-

als account for over 60 of the top 100 Twitterers. News

organizations and companies (for-profit and non-profit)

round out recent top 100 rankings.

Now consider the recent evolution of the blogosphere:

three years ago, 54% of the top blogs were maintained

by individuals (“personal blogs”) and 20% were run

by media organizations (both mainstream media and

smaller online publishing companies). As you can see in

the chart below, this year, that’s flipped: media organiza-

tions have come to dominate the rankings, accounting

for 57% of the top blogs, while personal blogs account

for just 23%. As more companies and media organiza-

tions embrace micro-blogging, we expect them to domi-

nate the ranks of the most influential micro-blogs, too.

In this graph, “personal blogs” refer to ...