Surveys get a bad rap. Mention a survey and people are transported back to days of terminally dull 8,000 question surveys administered...
The State of Twitter
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
It's no secret that Twitter has made a huge splash in our world, recently jumping from tech community darling to full blown mainstream awareness. Since it first began to gain popularity, supporters and critics alike have debated as to the use of this new tool.
While it is foolish to simply write off Twitter as a growing number of people both inside and out of the tech community have, the proliferation of useless 'what I'm doing" tweets that are at best borderline narcissistic do raise serious questions as to just what Twitter is good for. But is Twitter simply getting the wave of fallout that anything that reaches critical mass receives, is there a real value to the service it provides?
The glut of "OMG, I am still waiting for my latte" type tweets have certainly taken center stage as the biggest complaint levied against Twitter, but it seems that it shouldn't be so much of an argument against using Twitter, but rather a point at which Twitter loses its usefulness. At its core, Twitter is simply a communications tool; a way for people to transmit information to a filtered group of people. To argue that that kind of tool isn't useful seems shaky at best. What really needs to happen is to look not at whether or not Twitter should be used, but what Twitter should be used for.
This leads to a very informative article over at Harvard Business.org. During a study, they uncovered several interesting trends, such as that 80% of the userbase follows or is followed by at least one person, and that men typically have more followers the women, something that is counter to almost every other social networking community in which you find that women typically have more followers, both male and female, then men.
Perhaps most interesting, however, is that the 10% most prolific "Tweeters" account for over 90% of all tweets, which begs the question: Is Twitter a means for everyone to communicate, or is it instead a "many-to-one" publishing network, more akin to a blog? It is a very interesting article, and a highly recommended read.
While it is foolish to simply write off Twitter as a growing number of people both inside and out of the tech community have, the proliferation of useless 'what I'm doing" tweets that are at best borderline narcissistic do raise serious questions as to just what Twitter is good for. But is Twitter simply getting the wave of fallout that anything that reaches critical mass receives, is there a real value to the service it provides?
The glut of "OMG, I am still waiting for my latte" type tweets have certainly taken center stage as the biggest complaint levied against Twitter, but it seems that it shouldn't be so much of an argument against using Twitter, but rather a point at which Twitter loses its usefulness. At its core, Twitter is simply a communications tool; a way for people to transmit information to a filtered group of people. To argue that that kind of tool isn't useful seems shaky at best. What really needs to happen is to look not at whether or not Twitter should be used, but what Twitter should be used for.
This leads to a very informative article over at Harvard Business.org. During a study, they uncovered several interesting trends, such as that 80% of the userbase follows or is followed by at least one person, and that men typically have more followers the women, something that is counter to almost every other social networking community in which you find that women typically have more followers, both male and female, then men.
Perhaps most interesting, however, is that the 10% most prolific "Tweeters" account for over 90% of all tweets, which begs the question: Is Twitter a means for everyone to communicate, or is it instead a "many-to-one" publishing network, more akin to a blog? It is a very interesting article, and a highly recommended read.
