by Sarah Schoenfelder-

It's revenge of the silent Twitter users. After a Harvard Business School study made headlines last week showing 10% of Twitter users account for 90% of Twitter content, another survey emerged today echoing those findings. HubSpot, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup crunched the numbers and has released a report called the June 2009 State of the Twittersphere with some startling findings.

The in-depth study followed 4.5 million users over a nine-month span, as compared to the HBS study, which tracked 300,000 users. While Twitter is 10 million users strong and growing, the HubSpot study shows “55.5 percent of Twitter users are not following anyone…52.7 percent of Twitter users have no followers…and 54.9 percent have never tweeted.”

In an interview with BBC News, Harvard Business School researcher Bill Heil said, "The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen data says very, very few people listen consistently.”  Tech blogger Om Malik wonders if that’s actually a problem” for Twitter in his GigaOm blog. Malik tends to thinks its “Not particularly.” He cites that “On the social web the 80/20 rule — 80 percent consumers to 20 percent creators — is the norm.”

As Malik points out, the service’s core devotees are more than faithful: “The good news for Twitter is that people who like Twitter love using the service. For instance, an average Twitter user tweets at least once — actually 0.97 times — a day and thus far has tweeted about 119.34 times total.” Still, can Twitter start to monetize and turn a profit on the users it can count on: a smallish, devoted core? Source: GigaOm, more BBC news, more