Limited participation: the Achilles Heel of social media models?

In the past few weeks, several stories have emerged in the MSM regarding the limited participation of users in some forms of online social media. As anyone who has stood before a roomful of people and asked for a "show of hands" can tell you, only a select number of people are confident enough to draw attention to themselves. And it seems that online social media is not exempt from that phenomenon. Last month I discussed a study of user comments on PLoS that concluded that only 9% of users actually post comments on articles, and now a Harvard study has revealed that activity on Twitter is produced by an eerily similar percentage of users (10%).

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ⁱⁱ. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

I find that last sentence to be the most telling; although we have been bombarded with the "popularity" of Twitter, its value as a communications tool would appear to be less than revolutionary. I would suspect that this has little to do with the Twitter model, but more with simple human nature. The urge to actively contribute one's opinion is not universal and there may be a 10% plateau of user participation that some models cannot overcome once the number of users exceeds a certain point.

The question that I would pose is simple: Does it matter?