According to a study conducted by the researchers from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Google and Elisa the top 5 most frequent microblogging posts are “working,” “home,” “work,” “lunch,” and “sleeping.” Interestingly enough, the study was conducted on a dataset of 400,000 messages in Jaiku, a now largely forgotten Twitter competitor, acquired by Google in October 2007. While Jaiku is very similar to Twitter, it’s nowhere near as popular, and I’d prefer to see the above results confirmed by a similar study on Twitter and Facebook. An older study, compiled by the lexicographers of Oxford University Press, was based on a sampling of 1.5 million tweets, and it paints a slightly different picture. It shows the 500 most frequent words on Twitter, and while “work”, “sleep”, “home” and “lunch” are definitely there, they aren’t nearly the most frequently used words, even if you look at nouns and verbs only. For example, “love” is more frequently used than the four words mentioned above. So, there is still hope for us tweeple; yes, most of the posts on Twitter are mundane, but it’s the interesting stuff that we’re coming back for, and there’s no shortage of that if you follow the right people. Still, the Finnish study does confirm the theory that a small portion of microbloggers receive far more attention and exert far more influence than the majority. According to the study, “a small supercore of the Jaiku population receives over 50% of all comments in the system, while a large part of newcomers found it hard to build and keep an audience and dropped out quite soon after registering.” This is in accordance with an earlier Twitter study which had showed that 60% of Twitter users quit within the first month. But it also ties in to what is said above: if you have a good reason to tweet, and if your tweets are interesting, you’ll probably have no shortage of followers.

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• Our Microblogging Lives: Work, Home, Lunch, Sleep? (mashable.com)