The Dalai Lama on Twitter

A fake Dalai Lama account on Twitter attracted 20,000 followers in the two days that it took to be launched, reported as a fake by the office of the exiled Tibetan Buddhist monk, and taken off air. Before the account was exposed as a fake, the story was picked up by Agence France-Presse, PC Magazine, Tech Digest, and other notable news feeds and blogs.

Twitter suspended the account when they discovered that it was not created by the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and as such, the author had violated Twitter’s user agreement. The site re-launched days later after the author explicitly stated that it is not an official Dalai Lama Twitter account.

So why wouldn’t the Dalai Lama twitter? After all, 20,000 followers in two days takes the concept of viral marketing to an epidemic level. More>>

Harvard: Few Twits do most Tweets

Zenpundit broadcasting to the world (flowingdata.com)

BOSTON (Reuters) - A tiny fraction of those who use the fast-growing social network phenomenon Twitter generate nearly all the content, a Harvard Business School study shows. That makes it hard for companies to use the micro-blogging site as an accurate gauge of public opinion.

Twitter Inc. is a social networking website in which users post messages of 140 characters or less (known as "tweets") that can be viewed by other users who elect to follow them.

The Harvard study examined public entries of a randomly selected group of 300,000 Twitter users. The researchers studied in May 2009 the content created in the lifetime of the users' Twitter accounts.

It found that 10 percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content, said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, who led the research. More than half of all Twitter users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days. More>>