Twitter a one-way mode of communication?

Is Twitter a one-way mode of communication?

That's what a study from Harvard Business Publishing hypothesizes.

The study of 300,000 Twitter accounts found that that top ten percent most-prolific Twitter accounts accounted for 90 percent of all the Twitter posts. Which is amazing.

However, the study also show, "A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one."

This suggests, to me, that they didn't just do a poll of active accounts. There must have been a significant amount of accounts where people start an account, think, "I don't see what the fuss is about" and quit. Or they decide to shed the name and start a new account with a new name (even though it is incredibly easy to switch names in the "settings" menu).

The study writes:

To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

I'm not so sure if a study of those "top ten percent" of Twitter accounts wouldn't prove otherwise.

It would be interesting to see how many of the tweets sent out where "@ replies," or replying to the original author.