90/10 Rule

Slate chronicles some mono-micro-bloggers otherwise known as "Orphaned Tweets:"

After examining some 300,000 Twitter accounts, a Harvard Business School professor reported last week that 10 percent of the service's users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. The study dovetails with recent analysis by the media research firm Nielsen asserting that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next. Both findings suggest that, thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them.

Which got us to thinking—there must be a legion of Twitterers out there who sign up, tweet once, and never return. In the spirit of the great blog One Post Wonder, "a collection of blogs that have one post," we set out to find these orphaned tweets. Different people obviously have different tweet metabolisms, but we decided that any account that's been dormant for at least six months is fair game. We found several thousand of them.

...Reading many of these one-offs, you can't help but wonder whether some tragedy has come between the user and his second post.

Phillyrules it hurts to breathe. should I go to the hospital? 10:09 PM Aug 23rd, 2008

muthuboss life is hopeless ...... 10:26 PM Jul 6th, 2008

rvictor Trying to escape this insanity7:24 PM Jan 7th

jeffreyshardy Sitting next to a big, hairy, smelly guy on the bus5:04 PM Feb 11th

DouglasAllen I am writing an email to the makers of Spray N Wash to thank them for making a product that got the blood stains out of my new PJs and robe. 7:40 PM Aug 27th, 2007