Twitter is more of a spam engine serving up all sorts of crazy stuff. What I don’t like about Twitter, if you are not looking at the dashboard you miss out on a lot of stuff. Go ahead and tweet an article and see how long it stays on the main page. This also depends on how many people you are following. If you are following more than 2000 people your post is gone in a flash!
Twitter is starting to come in for a landing. The growth it has seen this year is fading fast. In fact, most new members don’t even come back the following month to use the service. A new study found that more than half of those in the “Twittersphere” aren’t tweeting, aren’t following anyone, and aren’t being followed by anyone.
HubSpot’s new “State of the Twittersphere Report” for June 2009 looked a data from more than 4.5 million Twitter users, with a particular focus on “activity levels” to see how often new and existing Twitterers are actually using Twitter.
Turns out that nearly 80 percent of users haven’t added a homepage URL to their profile, while more than 75 percent never entered a bio. Even worse, 55 percent of Twitter users aren’t following anyone, 52 percent don’t have any followers of their own, and 54 percent haven’t tweeted—which, after all, is the main thing you’re supposed to do on Twitter.
The report comes on the heels of a recent Harvard Business survey that found that 90 percent of the tweeting on Twitter comes from just 10 percent of its most active users, and that the median number of “lifetime tweets” for a given Twitterer is only one.
Meanwhile, a post on Mashable notes that Twitter’s phenomenal growth in recent months has abruptly stalled, with a mere 1.47 increase in user between April and May, after blistering triple-digit spurts earlier in the year.
Happy Tweeting! If you even tweet.
I think it was inevitable. If you could flush all the spammers it would be a different ballgame, but of course that can’t be done. Every new trend goes through stages, social media is in a filtering stage. Facebook remains king, the rest will have to work it out.
I just started tweeting, but today I had to block someone who found me on Tweetmondo — she had registered there to find people ‘close to her’. I guess she’s looking for clients since her business is ‘international companion’ and webcam/phone sessions. With only 10 followers I also had to tell another person to stop spamming the same website with different tinyurls — as if we might not notice… Definitely one of the 10% sending 98% of my traffic! lol
So Twitter can consume your time the way spam does. It becomes a turnoff for those people trying to figure it out.
Those Super amazing way to talented people should of got paid while they had the chance ;)
The site is definitely an extraordinary phenomena but I used to think the same of AOL like 20 yrs ago. I don’t hate twitter but I think it’s basically useless the same can be said of facebook. From both I have met ZERO cool bloggers.
Seems like all the cool people I was supposed to meet have been met :)
Anyway who cares about twitter I must say Frank that I have to give you some props for the content of this post.
thanks for being a cool dude and your friendship :)
John,
I thought the same about AOL. This is a lot different from AOL. Thanks for the props John!
Twitter, like any other social network, is only as good as it’s members, or at least the members you associate with. The people that I know who really enjoy Twitter are those that only follow a select few people – something which doesn’t work for those trying to gain a large following because of all those who do not follow those who do not follow back. And the only real way to know people will see your tweets is if your followers aren’t following a lot of other people either.
The spamming can happen to any network. Once their size grows, the spammers see the opportunity to get more exposure, and off they will go. New networks stay clean for a while, but sadly, not forever.
~ Kristi
Frank, you may like the recent report, Inside Twitter. This report has analyzed 11.5 million twitter users. See http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/ (specially the appendix if you like stats).
Tom,
Thank you for the comment and share. I will check it out.
Tom,
As Gravatar mentioned above, we issued our “Inside Twitter” report (sysomos.com/insidetwitter) last week, which looks at Twitters’s growth and how people are using Twitter. It’s pretty interesting to see how a lot of people are checking out Twitter but not necessarily using it on a regular basis. Meanwhile, a small group of people are extremely active.
Mark