We’re pretty sure that Twitter has transformed before our very eyes over the last 12 months. Way back in, oh, May 2009 we followed a smallish group of friends, contacts and people whose opinions we respected so that we could enjoy a slice of their life and thoughts as expressed in nice 140 character digestible bites.

Today our list of followers and those we follow has expanded somewhat but what really has changed is the importance we place on Twitter as an information stream. It’s no longer a secondary, perhaps diversionary pursuit in between our obsessive scan of RSS feeds and news sites (yeah we still go to the homepage sometime, call us old skool). Instead, our Twitter stream has replaced RSS as our primary digital go-to for news about business and social media in business.

It seemed obvious that the way we were using Twitter was a media channel rather than a pure social network. Now this piece of research from the Department of Computer Science at Kaist University, South Korea goes some way to adding some intellectual heft to our anecdotal hunch. What’s more they demonstrate their research with a  lot of number crunching and mathematical graph/chart creation than we would ever attempt.

To tell you the truth, we don’t understand all of what they purport to show but, hey, based on our simple logic it feels about right. Is this how you use Twitter nowadays?