Slate posted an interesting article recently called Orphaned Tweets: When people sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return. According to a study at Harvard Business School, 10% of the service's users account for 90% of the tweets.

This tells us two things.

1). Twitter matters or Harvard Business School wouldn't be studying it.

2). Early adopters are monopolizing the Tweetsphere.

This study doesn't surprise me. I am astonished daily to see dozens of tweets from a single person I'm following, often posted within seconds of one another, so that their thumbnail mug appears like a repeating pattern down the left-hand column of my web page.

Here's what I don't get: when do these people work?

I believe in social media. I believe Twitter is a valuable method for reaching customers and quickly disseminating information.

I also happen to believe that technologies like these can be so disruptive that true thinking -- that which requires longer increments than a few minutes -- is bypassed to compete in the Internet's seductive popularity contest of amassing followers at any cost.

This subject resurfaced for me today because of a blog posting I saw about a real-world experiment. The author is purposefully limiting his Internet usage to two hours a day simply because it's the only way he can get his work done. In a truly ironic twist, it took an Internet outage for this guy to grasp a real lightbulb moment. In the absense of Twitter/Facebook/Craigslist (insert your own Internet time-suck here) distractions, real genius flowers.

Labels: Harvard Business School, Marketing to Moms, Slate magazine, Twitter

Please leave your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below, even if -- no, especially if -- you don't agree with what I've written.