Call me racist and you'd be wrong, but urban blacks LOVE twitter and it has become a serious part of their everyday social lives. Breakups, hookups, gang wars -- it's on Twitter, and it's real.
I wouldn't attribute that to race but rather to it working well for the needs of a small subset of a demographic (trend setters) and as they use it more, others join in.
It would be interesting to see twitter networks broken down by demographic and an analysis of what each group uses it for. Some people use it to convey social information ("I'm in the checkout line at Walmart"), others as a stunted form of IRC ("Oh no, you did not just say that!") and most of the people I follow use it as a substitute for email where the primary purpose is to send links around.
If anyone feels compelled to do the research, I'd love to read your findings.
You know I've noticed this. Every single time I am convinced to check out Twitter I found the great majority of the posts on trending topics to have profile pictures of black people next to them. It is definitely an interesting phenomenon.
I've noticed that also, but I suspect it's mostly how people use twitter, rather than the overall population of twitter users; i.e. black twitterers are more likely than white twitterers to post in large public hashtags as a sort of chatroom.
A study (http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/17-Twitter-and-Statu...) did find that 26% of blacks vs. 19% of whites use "Twitter or another status update service", but it also found a large correlation with age. Since black demographics skew younger than white demographics, my guess is that the 7% racial gap would disappear if you controlled for age.
It would be interesting to see twitter networks broken down by demographic and an analysis of what each group uses it for. Some people use it to convey social information ("I'm in the checkout line at Walmart"), others as a stunted form of IRC ("Oh no, you did not just say that!") and most of the people I follow use it as a substitute for email where the primary purpose is to send links around.
If anyone feels compelled to do the research, I'd love to read your findings.