Sysomos analysed more than a billion tweets from over 20 million accounts, bio pages included, to describe the state of Twitter at the end of 2010, and the growth figure dwarfed everything else in it. Nearly 44% of all users on the platform had joined between January and mid-August of that year. Users who had signed up before January 2009 accounted for 4.7% of the population.
The second finding was that people were becoming easier to identify. The share of users with personal information in their bio doubled from 31% in 2009 to 63.3% in 2010, 82% now gave a name against 33% a year earlier, and 73% gave a location against 44%. That shift towards being identifiable reads as a platform maturing into something people were willing to be seen on.
Activity stayed extremely concentrated all the same. A hard core of 2.2% of users produced 58.3% of all tweets, and 22.5% accounted for roughly 90% of all activity — against 5% accounting for 75% of activity in 2009. More than three-quarters of users had posted fewer than 500 tweets in total. The study read the pattern as a growing population of people who consume updates and follow accounts outside their own circle of friends without posting much themselves, which is the shape most social platforms have kept since.