
Twitter hype punctured by study - pierrefar
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8089508.stm
======
trapper
Summary: "The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen
data says very, very few people listen consistently"

Twitter appeals to people who really, really care about news in real time.
Like techies, bloggers and journalists. These people feed the hype cycle
because it's what matters to them.

But like most of the "real" people I have tried to introduce to twitter, rss
readers, popurls etc they just say "I don't have time for that. Does any of it
really matter?".

And the answer is honestly... no. All important news eventually bubbles to the
top. Knowing it first doesn't really convey an advantage in the vast majority
of cases.

~~~
swombat
_And the answer is honestly... no. All important news eventually bubbles to
the top. Knowing it first doesn't really convey an advantage in the vast
majority of cases._

Twitter is more than a news source, however. Many people these days are using
it to connect with communities of related professionals, and numerous other
uses that I can't be bothered to list out right now.

------
lacker
_Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content._

On a related note, even _less_ than 10% of newspaper readers generate more
than 90% of newspaper content.

------
TrevorJ
The article highlights the true power of the service: A place to get ground-
level news and information from people who are close to the event.

Once Twitter becomes a mass-adopted service where everyone and there mother is
using it, it will have lost some of what makes it handy at the moment.

------
tokenadult
"Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard
study of 300,000 users found."

In round figures, that's true of most forms of online interaction.

------
ahoyhere
The original posting of the study, by HBR, went on and on about the
male/female split... but admitted that it was determined by using the
"strongly gendered" Real Names of the twitter users.

And yet, not _once_ did the article suggest that perhaps the male/female split
might be because women aren't as cavalier with their Real Names, or that a
significantly greater number of women have gender-ambiguous names or nicknames
than men? (Girls named Charlie vs boys named Sue?)

Maybe the original study does, but it's not available thru my subscription to
ACM.

