Tweeting in large cities less than expected: Study

Only a few people seem to be doing most of the tweeting in larger cities as a new US study has shown that less people tweet per capita from larger cities than in smaller ones.

Previous results on telephony -- the study of telecommunication -- suggested there should be more tweeting per capita in larger cities than in smaller.

Surprisingly, the study, published in the journal SAGE Open, found the opposite.

The researchers identified that while there are less people tweeting, there are a group of people who tweet prolifically.

This suggests there is a concentrated core of more active users that may serve as information broadcasters for larger cities.

"After calculating tweet volumes from 50 American cities of varying sizes, we found there was less tweeting per capita in larger cities," said Lav Varshney from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US.

"We found that a small number of people in cities were tweeting a lot more than the average. In cities, lots of people were not tweeting at all," said Varshney.

"What we determined is that a small number of people are tweeting and carrying information throughout the city," he added.

Much like newspapers, a few entities are responsible for spreading information through a large city, the study said.

The researches believe that the findings could have implications in understanding the urban pace of life.

--IANS

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