Our newsroom employs Twitter to understand what's being created. We leap on trends it identifies, we route through links it generates, and we develop our news report with one eye on it.

So it ought not to surprise anyone that a new study suggests Twitter is more than a social network. It's a news service.

The Korean study gathered information on more than 41 million users. Among the things it found:

1. Twitter's functionality resembles RSS, in that certain users develop followings.
2. A high number (in this case, 85 per cent) of Tweets were news-related.
3. A certain number of Twitter users have high followings and thus serve as significant distributors.
4. Twitter regularly beats conventional news organizations in breaking news (something our newsroom notices frequently).