The new issue of New York magazine out today includes a massive cover story on the inner workings of Twitter that I just read and found sort of interesting, particularly a part in which a handful of celebrities and the “internet famous” are revealed to be the backbone holding Twitter together.
A study conducted by sociologists working for Yahoo concluded that 50 percent of all the tweets come from just 20,000 users. “It’s really dominated by this media-celebrity-blogger elite,” says Duncan Watts, one of the researchers. “It’s a small number of users who are hyperconnected, and then there’s everybody else just paying attention to those people.”
To continue the broadcast metaphor, these people are the show users came to see. And Twitter is learning that it has to tend the talent as carefully as any entertainment company. In the planning rooms of Twitter, the most prolific and widely followed tweeters are called “influencers,” or “power users,” and they are at the core of its business. If it loses them, it becomes, essentially, MySpace—a digital graveyard where a party used to be. So while they race to retool the tweeting experience for the masses, Costolo and Dorsey are on a parallel campaign to keep Twitter’s star attractions, celebrities and politicians and the media, chattering away on Twitter. Last year, they opened offices in Hollywood and Washington, D.C., hiring liaisons to act as free Twitter consultants and keep influencers pumping out all-star tweets. In a conference room around the corner from Costolo’s office, Omid Ashtari, a former agent at Los Angeles talent firm Creative Artists Agency, tells me the pitch he gave actor James Franco before the Oscars last spring: “If you’re on Twitter and you have a spotlight shining on you in other media, your Twitter resonance and your Twitter growth explodes.”
The reason Twitter wants James Franco tweeting is to sell his audience to advertisers. And if it can figure out how to insert a Starbucks tweet into the Francosphere, and prompt people to buy coffee without stifling their intimacy with Franco, Twitter wins. This advertising model is still in the dream stage. But what a dream it is.
Something else I learned reading this piece: TPS reports actually exist in the Twitter offices…
At Twitter, they like to measure human events in tweets per second, or TPS. The more tweets per second, the more impressive and important the event—Twitter as the most important measure of human history. The company started releasing this number the summer of 2009, when Michael Jackson died and crashed Twitter’s service under the weight of 493 TPS.
On computer monitors on floor three, they can watch TPS for an event spike like commodities on a trading desk. The freak earthquake in Virginia in August reached 5,500 TPS, a number released to the press as a significant barometer of impact: “More tweets than Osama bin Laden,” said the London Telegraph.
That compares to 5,530 TPS for the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Or 6,436 TPS for the 2011 BET Awards, and 5,531 for the NBA Finals. In August, the new Twitter record was set: 8,868 TPS for Beyoncé’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.
And to think all this time that I had no idea Bill Lumbergh was an executive at Twitter. I’d been wondering what that guy was up to!