TwiPeople: a pseudo-scientific analysis of Twitter’s population

All Twitter users can be roughly divided into 7 cat­e­gories (in order of their arrival on the twi-scene):

  1. Programmers, SEO people and geeks of every kind. Originally they made up the bulk of Twitter’s users, which made it a good way to single out this socio-demographic group for ad cam­paigns and for test­ing new services.
  2. Managers from the inter­net industry. They came to Twitter to social­ize and to col­lect contacts.
  3. Marketers: those who came to Twitter to study social media, plus to social­ize, plus to pro­mote themselves/their sites and projects.
  4. Bloggers and jour­nal­ists. Twitter gave them a shared system for com­ment­ing and talk­ing, and, like the mar­keters, they pro­mote them­selves and their blogs there. Many jour­nal­ists came because of medianext ;)
  5. Post-LiveJournalers (LiveJournal, LJ for short, being the Russian-speaking inter­net’s big blog­ging plat­form). Fairly recently they’ve started arriv­ing on Twitter in small groups (people who know each other in real life, or LJ friends), because they’ve heard there’s this trendy thing and “every­one’s already there”, but they haven’t yet worked out why.
  6. Post-VKontakters. They came to Twitter for no clear reason, under­stood noth­ing and gave up. As a rule they have few updates, and the last one was a month or a month and a half ago. The post-LiveJournalers often join them.
  7. Others: a place reserved for answer­ing the ques­tion “Well, and where would you put me, then?”

As always in such cases, the bound­aries between the groups are arbi­trary: lots of people belong to sev­eral groups at once, and some you can’t even fit into “Others”.

In future stud­ies I’ll try to derive for­mu­las for users’ twi-activity and the Following coefficient.