As we’ve been doing our Twitter survey, we noticed that most of what was going on was conversations and mindless babble… When we started, the homepage said “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?“
We guess Twitter also noticed there was a lot of boring babble going and was hoping to make it more useful for people, especially all those people who say they just don’t get the point of Twitter. If it’s just status updates, can’t we just use Facebook? So after the Twitter revolution of it being hailed a useful news source during the Iran election protests and talk of a Nobel Prize for Twitter, they have changed the homepage to say “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”
Is Twitter hoping to become more useful than CNN? Are they hoping that more people will use it to promote their business or personal victories? If companies latch on to Twitter and use it as a broadcasting medium for their new products, will Twitter still be useful? Will they start charging for commercial accounts? Will anyone actually follow an advertiser? Several companies have already shown a major drop in followers after sending out product messages. On the other hand, Twitter can be a useful tool for instant updates. The Australian government used Twitter to send out a Tsunami warning following an earthquake in New Zealand.
I guess Twitter is something different for everyone. How you use it depends largely on who you follow. Some people use it for news updates. Others use it as a messaging tool. Others promote their business with it. For others it just a time waster at work. It does seem to be either an all or nothing phenomenon. Many people just don’t see the point of it. They may try it once or twice and then give up. Those that do use Twitter are fairly constant in their use. Statistics show that it’s actually about 5% of Twitterers who do about 75% of the tweets. Some people obviously either have too much time or their hands or too much self importance. Personally, I think if you have that much time to Tweet every 5 minutes, you’re probably not getting anything else done and probably aren’t that important. How much time do people have anyway. (Yes, I’m talking to you Ashton Kutcher!) Personally, I don’t care who Perez Hilton hates today. Or what Shaq is doing right now. I’m also not that interested in the daily goings on of someone on the other side of the world tweeting they just had a ham sandwich for lunch. But, I do follow people like CNN and some fellow expats that always have interesting news from both sides of the globe. I’ve also unfollowed a couple of people because I just didn’t find their tweets to be interesting. Especially those that post too too much.
Stay Tuned. Next week we’ll post the results of our Twitter Analysis.
