Twitter Learns What We All Knew. People Are Followers
An interesting article over at CNNMoney.com has found that only 27% of Twitter users are active. Their definition of active is people who have at least 10 followers, follow 10 people and have posted at least 10 times. Well with those criteria I’m a verbose barely active user with my 11 followers, 13 followings, and 250+ tweets.This doesn’t surprise me to terribly much. From my experiences there are two ways to use twitter to use the example a friend of mine linked a while ago which I sadly can’t find are mirrow people and window people. Mirror people post as if they look out and just see their reflection and need to tell the world every little detail of their day which has always struck me as a little narcissistic, granted I’m blogging about my opinions of these kinds of people which probably doesn’t bode well for myself. The other kind are window people who post tweets about what they see in the world around them. Personally I don’t see the first camp offering much to the world, other than an easier way to help bored people cyber-stalk you. The later while offering external information for their group of followers to see many (myself included ala this post) are just creating another venue of a news-feed. Also as we select who we follow the chance to filter content you might not agree with doesn’t even help give broader perceptiveness. I’m not saying this is something limited to only Twitter but how many liberals probably follow Glen Beck?
I think the public at large has finally shaken the dew off this lily and what they’re left with isn’t as amazing as they had hoped it would be. I don’t find Twitter particularly useful for things such as online collaboration or even getting my ideas across (hence this blog). To use a probably out of date analogy I see Twitter just being an easy to update IM Client status message. Back in college I’d put up “At Class” etc to let folks know where I was. For collaboration I see far greater potential in Google’s Wave for instance.
Do I think Twitter is going to vanish anytime soon, no. Do I see it expanding into some super web presence that single-handedly fosters global free information, no. It is what it is, a simple way to link data (small posts, or urls to greater information) to others, how relevant you make that information is up to you. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go back to cyber-stalking Ashton Kutcher and President Obama.
