The Dictionary Team at Oxford University Press has analyzed randomly-selected tweets and has found the sentence length is cut roughly by half than in general usage, gerunds are the norm, and most statements refer to the author of the tweet. The statistics are reported on the OUP blog.
The OUP blog links to Gawker (not my favorite blog by far, but the post is interesting), which links to a Harvard study with some interesting social statistics about Twitter. It seems Twitter is an oddity among social networks when it comes to gender. While activity on other social networks seems to focus around women, Twitter is all about men.
Of course, I had to go look at my tweets and my follower/followed numbers. I seem to fit the norm. I follow mostly men (not on purpose), I use very short sentences with plenty of gerunds, and I don’t tweet as much as those 10% users who make up 90% of the total activity of the site.
UPDATE: The Business Insider has statistics about Twitter’s popularity (or lack of).
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