Looking back at two years of Twitter, what’s changed?

Sysomos, a marketwire company compared global Twitter usage in 2010 vs. 2009, analyzing over one billion tweets to discover various changes in Twitter activity over the past year.

So what did they learn?

We’ve become more public. Firstly, people are realizing it’s more important to have a Twitter bio. And significantly more users are disclosing their location, bio and web information in their Twitter profiles. Interestingly, they also found that Justin Bieber is one of the top two-word phrases and top names in user’s bios. So for example, “Bio: Justin Bieber fan.” Within the bios of Twitter users, the most popular keywords are love, life, music, follow, Twitter, world, live, student, know and girl.

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Twitter Rocked 2010. Considering Twitter has been around since July, 2006, it’s surprising that new users from January until mid-August, accounted for nearly 44% of the total Twitter population. People who created a profile before January 2009 only accounted for 4.7% of the total population.

The Twitter Royalty and the Twitter Serfs. What I mean is that people who use Twitter, really use Twitter. A small hard-core group (2.2%) have accounted for 58.3% of all tweets; 22.5% have accounted for about 90% of all activity and more than three-quarters of Twitters users – 80.6% – have made fewer than 500 tweets. Lastly, the vast majority of users – 95.8% – have less than 500 friends.

The Most Active Tweeters of 2010
In looking at the most active tweeters, it appears that many of them are automatic feed generators. The most active tweeter is @qanow, from the Japanese website QaNow which has posted more than 366,000 tweets. Among the few real people on the list are @mikehanes, an IT recruiter who has made more than 300,000 tweets, and @dustinlabarge, a writer who has written more than 117,000 tweets.

With Twitter’s recent $200 million investment and $3.7 billion dollar valuation, they’re due for an even more rocking 2011.