Link: AlterNet: The Trouble With Twitter.
I wasn't sure how to explain Twitter's bizarre popularity until I read an article published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that used data from hundreds of cities to create a mathematical model suggesting that the "pace of life" in urban areas speeds up exponentially relative to population size.
What that means is if your population grows at rate n, your pace of life grows at the rate of n-squared. In other words, really freakin' fast. Pace of life, according to first author of the study Luis Bettencourt, includes everything from technological innovation to wealth and the speed of walking traffic. So you'd expect that as the populations of cities grow, for example, the speed of communications technology such as Twitter should grow exponentially faster....
