I have heard the fever pitch mania of Twitter up close. Hell, I was even guilted into joining Twitter by a Facebook group hell bent on seeing me genuflect to its 140 character gravitas.
But with all the early adopting love that bloggers have showered it, there aren't that many who have actually joined Twitter and even more shockingly, people who post frequently.
Hugh Macleod sums up the genesis of social media in the cartoon above and how it has become both a frenzy to build a following and a game of chance to try and find social media-ites with genuine content to talk about now. Many of the really insightful hobbyist bloggers have fled blogging for the more ADD-paced Twitter or perhaps worse, the social sausage grinder (sorry aggregator) FriendFeed (I'm with O"Reilly - even though Twitter doesn't work 1/2 the time, there is something great about its minimalism vs. FriendFeed's ).
The passionate sweat equity that made us giddy with the potential revolutionary idea-generating powers of social media just a couple of years ago has splintered into a web traffic jam. Case in point, of the 20+ some odd posts on my Twitter front page 2 minutes ago, there was only one post of any real substance, two if I counted the NYTimes update on Obama.
I've come to accept Twitter as the shorthand for finding progressive bloggers much like my yellow Livestrong bracelet is a shorthand for being active and caring about a cause to others. I can connect with my blogger brtehren with a fraction of the effort but the facts about Twitter are:
- Twitter is down a lot ... I mean a lot..very disappointing
- I find Twitter lacks some of the smart and semantically intelligent things you find on other social networks - as much as its spartan look should be praised, it truly leaves a lot of good stuff on the table
- there are barely more than 1,000,000 folks on Twitter - some are not real and many have lapsed - FriendFeed albeit growing is safely less than 1/2 that count (that comprises less than 1% of the blogger herd)
- some really smart bloggers are on Twitter but when they jump on in this media, they become tongue tied and lose all kinds of substance
- Twitter installs the A-listers at the top of the pyramid, your influence as a top 10 Tweeter is exponentially larger than others but is not based on merit as for the most part, the A-list tweets aren't any more insightful
- Twitter is about cliques - perhaps I hung out with too many groups in high school, but part of what appealed to be about social media was that many disparate people could connect with each other, Twitter reinforces the alpha pack and partisan mentality
In terms of traffic, I looked at 100 people randomly in my Toronto location who are on Twitter. This was the breakdown of the time of their last post:
Within the last 24 hours - 12%
Within the last day - 5%
Withing the last 2-4 days - 14%
Within the last 5-10 days - 8%
Within the last 10-30 days - 10%
Within the last 2 months - 6%
Within the last 2-3 months - 13%
Within the last 4-6 months - 2%
Within the last 7-12 months - 7%
Not within the last year - 23%
Hardly the daily microblogging appliance we have all come to hear all the buzz about, driven mainly by these folks. Sidebar - interesting if you're looking to break into the top 10 or 1000 Twitterers respectively - you would have to follow or be followed by 21.000+ and 930+ people respectively and you would have to have updated over 119k+ and 6.5k+ times respectively.
So please, stop the social overload - somebody just push my favourite 50 content rich blogs, my 300 favourite friends, my favourite Facebook apps, my most interesting updates from others and my top variety of videos and iTunes, mash em all together into something that works, maybe even throw me a flavour of the day based on my likes and dislikes and I'd be a happy camper.
And bloggers, stop the ADD and write a good " make me see the world in a different way" post once every so often.
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