Newbie Twitter users not sticking around

A Consumerist rehash of a story that has already been discussed to death on HN, for instance here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583942

It's interesting... for a while, the tech tabloids loved Twitter because it was a great source of fake gossipy headlines.

But now... it feels like the tide's turning and the big tabloid blogs are turning against Twitter. Maybe some editors aren't too happy at the fact that their breathless "OMG TWITTER IN TALKS TO BE BOUGHT BY..." stories never pan out and have exposed their own credibility problems?

API accesses are important. Did it get answered definitively how Nielsen accounted for that?

I'd like to run a test to see when the last tweet was from N users. It would be easy to extract a basic cohort analysis from that.