This morning, a colleague of mine shared this article http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html 

The article notes that 90% of all Tweets are Tweeted by 10% of Tweeters. (Now, there’s a tongue twister you don’t say everyday). Most people it would appear are happy to consume information from Twitter, rather than provide content.

It makes sense really. Those people who have a story to tell, a business to market, a brand to build, a community to finesse or a celebrity profile to flaunt are certainly going to be the most prolific of content sharers and anecdotal tweeters on Twitter.

This statistic might seem like a chink in Twitter’s armour, but I don’t think it is. If most folk on Twitter are happy to consume then that is an incredibly valuable outcome, provided there are plenty of people contributing. And, they are. In some ways, the social behaviour for those publishers on Twitter, the ability to create a brand for yourself and to engage with community is a means-to-an-end. That end, is the Holy Grail, the Social Grail if you will - and that would be Real-Time search.

In my inaugural post on this blog, I attempted to explain what Twitter was, and I coined the one liner: “In short Twitter is your very own online community builder centred around you and your interests!”

This statement still holds, with the caveat that in light of the article above, not everyone wants to build a community, and not everyone has a story to tell. Most people are happy to listen to the story being told. They are happy to follow the Celebrity, the interesting Travel Blogger, the cool photographer, the President of the USA, or the tech geek – and get access to great content.

So I’d like to pivot on the question I asked earlier. The important question is not “What is Twitter”, but rather “What has Twitter become?”

”Twitter has become a user-generated search index of the most valuable real-time content on the internet”

If I think of earlier social-search services, like Yahoo Answers & Live Search QnA. These services attracted many people to provide content, but certainly not with the same take-up rate and as broad a publisher participation as that of Twitter. Providing content to a community can be time-consuming, so it’s important there is a hook there – something for the ego of the publisher. Something that compels them to contribute. In Yahoo Answers, it was a rating system. For Twitter, it’s the number of followers and opportunity for retweeted content. The promise of getting your message & brand out to the broadest audience possible has enabled Twitter to build the most compelling index of user-generated content to date.

Given Search is such a widely proven online business model, then it’s no wonder that there is so much discussion around how Twitter will monetise it’s Twitter Searches.

Yes, Twitter is a compelling social network. But, this is the means-to-the-end. And the end is the Social Grail, Real-time Search.