Traditional social networks fueled Twitter’s spread

Site's U.S. growth relied primarily on media attention, geographic proximity of users. We've all heard it: The Internet has flattened the world, allowing social networks to spring up overnight, independent of geography or socioeconomic status. Who needs face time with the people around you when you can email, text or tweet to and from almost anywhere in the world? Twitter, the social networking and microblogging site, is said to have more than 300 million users worldwide who follow, forward and respond to each other's 140-character tweets about anything and everything, 24/7. But MIT researchers who studied the growth of the newly hatched Twitter from 2006 to 2009 say the site's growth in the United States actually relied primarily on media attention and traditional social networks based on geographic proximity and socioeconomic similarity. In other words, at least during those early years, birds of a feather flocked - and tweeted - together. In their study of Twitter's "contagion process," the researchers looked at data from 16,000 U.S. cities, focusing on the 408 with the highest number of Twitter users and seeking to update traditional models of how information spreads and technology is adopted. Just as marketing experts sometimes label consumers as early adopters, early majority adopters, late majority adopters or laggards, the researchers characterized cities in those terms, based on when Twitter accounts in a given city reached critical mass.