People have been going mad about Twitter, but is it all media hype? ‘Micro-blogging’ still remains in the hands of the few according to Harvard research. Despite the fact that where constantly told the whole world is tweeting about everyone else just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content.

Estimates suggest it now has more than 10 million users and is growing faster than any other social network. However, the Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days.

And most people only ever “tweet” once during their lifetime, the researchers found. “Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it,” said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School who carried out the work.

However one could argue that Twitter is made up of two groups of people. There are individuals who use it to network amongst their friends, or  businesses looking to promote themselves to the masses. If the study removed the organisations looking for promotion, then the results may mirror other social networking sites.

Its unprecedented growth has become the poster child of social networking sites, particularly among media companies, which I think needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. This isn’t to say social networking should be taken lightly by any means. After all if Facebook was country it would be the eighth most populated in the world.