The deluge of data and analysis on Twitter is continuing to roll. By the time the 10,000 conference and peer-reviewed papers get published in the next 6-8 months, they'll all have been scooped by the folks who are doing public analysis for other audiences.

First, there's a paper by Mor Naaman, Jeffrey Boase, Chih-Hui Lai called "Is it Really About Me? Message Content in Social
Awareness Streams" (PDF). Among a variety of interesting and nuanced findings, the authors show evidence that about 80% of Twitter users are "meformers" – people whose Tweets are mostly about themselves. Only 20% were in the "informer" category – people who share information about other topics.

Surprisingly, TechCrunch has lately been the source of seemingly high quality data about Twitter. In addition to Geoff Cook's great guest post on Why Teens Don't Tweet, back in October Robert Moore posted a huge amount of data and longitudinal analysis.

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And, just today, TechCrunch has news from Comscore that Twitter's growth has basically flattened out for both international and US users, this despite a recent push of new features and new languages. In September I predicted the demise of Twitter, and this seems to be the first stage. 2009 was definitely their year – arguably no technology was more popular, more widely talked about than Twitter was this year. 2010 will be the year of soul searching for Twitter, where the new-ness wears off, new features don't gain the expected traction, and the company continues to look for a reliable business model. If Twitter has a big future, it's going to be as a messaging platform that underlies more interesting services.