Your friends are more interesting than you. There, I have said it. However, it is true – at least “on average”. The phenomenon of the “friendship paradox” was first identified by Professor Scott Feld of Purdue University, Indiana, USA. He discovered that an individual’s friends tend to have more friends than they do. If you have 25 friends, on average each of those friends will have more than 25 friends. That’s because we tend to want to make friends with people who are popular, so we seek out people with plenty of friends.

On Twitter, it seems, we are just the same. New research shows that we tend to follow people who have more followers than ourselves. We are also interested in people who Tweet more than we do. The result is what you might call “Tweet blindness”.

Because we are following people who have more followers than ourselves, our Twitter streams start to get overloaded, especially as the people in this paradox will be Tweeting more frequently than we do. Pretty soon, the researchers found, our Twitter stream becomes overloaded with information.

As a result we can only easily see the already “viral” stuff – the Tweets about subjects that we already know about. The less obvious, new, interesting, newsworthy Tweet just disappears into the background noise.

So, if you want to use Twitter to see the obvious, then carry on following people who have more followers than yourself. If, however, you want Twitter to alert you to the new and interesting the only option is to cull the list of people you are following. Follow fewer people and those newsworthy Tweets will become obvious.

You will then be able to to Retweet such new information to a group of people who will have fewer followers than you, making the information you Tweet more visible to them.

It is apparently simple mathematics; yet I like to think of it this way – less information is more…!

Twitter is coming in for a bit of stick today. It turns out that yesterday the world’s financial markets went into meltdown as a Tweet suggested that President Barack Obama had been injured in a bomb attack on The Whitehouse. It looked true enough because it was from the accredited Twitter stream of Associated Press. Suddenly, the Dow Jones fell by 100 points and the companies listed by Standard & Poor lost $136 billion.

Of course, it was a fake Tweet, with the Associated Press account having been hacked into by the “Syrian Electronic Army”. Now, the anti-Twitterati are in their element saying you cannot believe a word that is said on Twitter. If respected organisations like AP can be hacked into, just who can you believe on Twitter?

The problem is not Twitter; it is the world’s financial markets. In the “olden days” the financial markets were controlled by human beings. They would keep up to date with information about companies and business in general and consider things rationally. Even if they had to act fast, there was always their analytical brain helping them out.

Now, though, the financial world is controlled by automated systems. If a share price falls by just one pence, for some clients, the computer is programmed to automatically buy or sell – no human involvement. Much of the financial meltdown yesterday was due to automation which cannot think. It was only later on when human beings got involved, thinking “hang on a minute, is this really true” that order was restored.

It is not Twitter that is to blame, but a ridiculous business practice within the financial sector which appears to think that speed and automation are more important than consideration, reflection and thinking. Had these business practices been in place then Wall Street would not have been so panicked yesterday.

The same is true for any business, though. Reacting to Tweets, without thinking, adding comments to blog posts without consideration – these are all part and parcel of everyday life in many companies. Perhaps the reaction to the fake AP Tweet should be a lesson to us all; thinking is a really important business function that we sometimes do not do enough of.

Who would have thought that Twitter could be an informational and educational tool better than traditional media? That’s the implication of work by Benjamin Gleason, a researcher at Michigan State University. But this notion is based on evidence. The study collected all the Tweets produced about the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and placed them in a database where proper analysis was conducted.

The data shows that there are a wide array of viewpoints expressed and that these represent a much more complete picture of the subject than found in a newspaper. As a result, people could get a better understanding of a topic if they follow it on Twitter than if they rely on mainstream media.

Of course, this rather depends upon the involvement of people on Twitter. If you set up a series of Tweets and chat away about your ideas on a topic, yet no-one else says a word, then the Twitter stream would be biased and much less informative than a newspaper article where the reporter would at least attempt to strike a balance between different sides of the argument.

However, for mainstream topics it could well be worthwhile following the discussions on Twitter to get a better picture of the subject and enhance your understanding.

The easiest way of doing this is with HootSuite, where you can set up a separate stream for each topic you want to follow. Either set up a “search” for the topic or a column for a popular hashtag. That way you will be easily kept updated on the subject and be able to see all the various views.

If the research on Occupy Wall Street is right, then you could well learn more from doing this than if you rely on mainstream magazines to keep you updated on topics.