An online internet research study shows Twitter users use Twitter to find or spread news rather than for social media purposes. Almost all of Twitter's trending topics are news headlines.

"What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?" The goal of this work is to study to better understand the popularity of Twitter and the transformation of Twitter since its development up until the present day. 

The study focuses on the "topological characteristics of Twitter and its power as a new medium of information sharing." This is the first quantitative study on the entire Twittersphere. Twitter allows physicists, sociologists, and linguists to study human behavior. The study is broken up in to various sections; The basics of twitter, comparing the PageRank algorithm and ranking of retweets, and overall user popularity.

Headline news is responsible for nearly 90% of trending topics.
No matter how many followers you have, any retweeted tweet can reach up to 1,000 users. "Once retweeted, a tweet gets retweeted almost instantly on next hops, signifying fast diffusion of information after the 1st retweet."Twitter regularly tracks phrases, words, and hashtags that are mentioned the most and posts them in a category titled "trending topics."Trending topics represent the issues that draw the most attention during that day. Most trending topics start because of a hashtag, and a hashtag allows user to start and/or follow a thread of discussion.

There was no correlation between influence and the amount of followers someone has. However, there is a relationship between the amount of followers you have and the amount you tweet. 
The number of followers alone does not reflect the influence a user exerts when the user’s tweet is retweeted many times "or is simply followed by other influential people: it is not a comprehensive measure." The number of tweets increases by an order of magnitude as the number of followings goes over 5, 000. As of 2009 there were only 40 users with more than a million followers. All of these users are either celebrities or mass media.

Twitter is a source for information rather than a social networking site.
The study shows that nearly 70% of users are not followed by any of the people they follow on twitter. Researchers believe the reason for this is because these users are using twitter for information and not for a social networking site. Contact between similar people occurs at a higher rate than among people that are different from each other.

The number of retweets for a certain tweet is a measure of the tweet’s popularity and in turn of the tweet writer’s popularity. 
Trending topics rise quickly in popularity and eventually end. Retweeting is an effective way to transfer and relay information to people in your geographic location. The tweets of top trending topics are reflective on the temporal behavior of trending topics and user participation. These findings suggest that Twitter is efficient at spreading news and I do agree that twitter spreads news quickly but it does not spread news effectively. These findings do reflect on one way how users use Twitter. But I disagree with the fact that most users use Twitter as a source for information rather than a social networking site. 

However if you do want to find out information fast and you don't have a lot of time to read I think twitter is the best source. I was shocked when I learned that the amount of followers you have doesn't necessarily reflect the amount of influence you have. I would think most celebrities would be responsible for most peoples opinions. I also was surprised to learn that the more followers you have the more you tweet. I follow a lot of musicians, and sports figures and it seems as if they tweet the least. As twitter grows I am sure that more and more research studies will be conducted.