Lots of folks these days talk, write, blog, tweet, rant, and certainly joke about the power of Twitter. To the uninitiated (presuming of course there are any uninitiated left out there) I get that it does all seem a lot of silly hype. Too much technology, too few hours in the day to keep up, too much social imposition. I get it. And yet, those of us that are using Twitter to build our or a client's brand see every day the power of the almighty tweet. But now we have an unprecedented analysis of not just the power of Twitter, but more specifically, the massive exponential power of the re-tweet.

Four researchers from the Department of Computer Science at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology programmed 20 PCs to gobble, chew, swallow and spew the entire contents of Twitter over the course of a month, all for the benefit of further study. (If you were on Twitter in July 2009, you're in there.)

Their findings surprised even themselves and turned their predictions upside down. It appears that on Twitter 4 is the new 6 degrees of separation. Well, 4.12, to be precise. In other words, anything you put out there will reach a broader, more interested audience more quickly on Twitter than in other social medias. Especially once you start to become a trusted filter. The trick, of course, is to be relevant enough to be retweeted. (Read the full article by MIT's guest blogger Christopher Mims here: http://tinyurl.com/2d8gfhp)