T&A: In a blog post at Harvard Business.org, a study into the behavioral patterns of Twitter users based on gender has unveiled some very interesting results.

Based on data collected from a sampling pool of 300,542 users in May 2009, the study reveals that there are more female Twitter users than males (55 versus 45%).

According to a study on Twitter by Harvard Business, an average man is twice more likely to follow another man while a woman is only 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. However, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman.

According to the study, this is interesting, considering that on typical online social networks, most of the activity is focused around women (ie. men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, but women generally follow content produced by only women they know). (more…)

T&A: A French hacker has reportedly broke into Twitter’s internal administration system, giving him access to accounts of millions of Twitter users, including Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Ashton Kutcher and Lily Allen.

According to IT security and control firm Sophos, the hacker – known as ‘Hacker Croll’ – stole a password from a staff at the micro-blogging site and used it to reset the employee’s Yahoo password after guessing his ‘secret question’.

The latest report from Smart Company revealed that though the hacker gained access to the accounts, no information was altered or removed, and that only 10 accounts were viewed. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone also mentioned that the site is currently undergoing an independent security audit.

T&A: Knowledge at Wharton, an online business journal by Pennsylvania State’s Wharton School of Business published an article analyzing the business viability of the current Twitter model in the world of social networking sites.

While general predictions see a likelihood that the San Francisco-based Twitter company might get bought up by a larger, more diversified Internet-based company, the argument now is whether the company should continue on its traffic-building run (it’s only three years old) or relook at a money-making model. (Editor opinions: 1) (more…)