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The social network Twitter appeared in 2006 as a way of internal corporate communication. Over the past seven years, this project has captured virtually the entire world, and the blue bird has become a full-fledged symbol of the new information age. On Twitter, people report what is happening to them, what they are doing. Thanks to the connection between Twitter and other network resources, we can learn about a wide variety of events in a person’s life: from their breakfast to where they buy clothes.

Twitter is a separate information and cultural phenomenon that could not fail to attract the attention of scientists.

The secret of success
According to Pear Analytics, 41% of tweets tell users what is happening to other users. This data reflects well the foundations of our society. I am not talking about a post-industrial society based on information, but about human society throughout its history. Our first ancestors were social animals, and communication between them was the guarantee of the existence of the pack and its survival.

One theory about the development of our brain is that we needed direct moving leads email lists this organ for social communication, and that manual labor and intelligence were byproducts of the social lifestyle of early humans. Whether this was true or not is still not known for certain, but the idea is attractive.

Our brain is designed to live in society, and it is adapted for contact with people.
For example, gossip, which each of us is drawn to from time to time, plays a special role in public life.



It's not known whether monkeys really gossip, but it seems that our distant ancestors instilled in us a craving for gossip, the perfect expression of which has become Twitter.

In 2009, German psychologists proved that negative opinions about people are remembered better than positive ones. Such selective memorization allows one to insure oneself against failures in communication and joint affairs and, most likely, developed as a useful adaptation during the evolution of our species.

News on Twitter accounts for about 4% of traffic, and there are studies that study the ways in which they are distributed. At the University of Arizona, this issue was thoroughly studied and news distribution patterns were created for major publications such as Reuters, Forbes, and the New York Times. Scientists studied how users retweet news from the main media account, how they post it themselves, and other similar processes. This allowed specialists to assess the nature of news distribution and the duration of its “life” on the social network. The data obtained for each news agency was presented in the form of a drawing resembling a firework explosion. The most “tenacious” news was from the BBC, and the average “life” of news is between 10 hours and 3 days.

Another study assessed how Twitter helps news outlets grow their audiences. Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow compared information on 51 million tweets over 11 weeks with news stories over the same period. Twitter users were particularly active in spreading news about sporting events and natural disasters. Despite this, the researchers say the social network has no advantage over news outlets.

Twitter can be used to attract people's attention to a big news story or to get additional readers. Most users still read the news on the site itself, rather than learn it from social networks. Interestingly, this trend is also typical for Russian Internet media.