I suppose a lot of people are either fascinated or confused by Twitter these days. For those of you still mulling over whether or not it makes sense to get engaged, you can take some comfort in a recent survey which indicates that although a whopping 88% of Americans have heard of Twitter, only 7% currently use it, so clearly it’s still early days. My personal journey into the Twittersphere is only a few months old. Prior to this, I was hesitant for a number of reasons, including but not limited to:
- The latest scoop on all the hottest celebrities! Every minute of every day! Sorry Ashton, Britney, Ellen, Kim, Oprah, etc., I’m sure you’re very nice people but I’m just not that interested. Plenty of other ways THE MAN has to distract the masses and manufacture consent.
- 140 characters? What’s up with that? Visions of being inundated with valuable content like “Watching football now, awesome game” and “What time is it?!” (the latter gem is real, by the way). I understand the SMS message size design point and all, but still.
- ADD afflicted need only apply. Tweets are short. Blogs and books are just too long and have all those silly word thingies and reading is like hard and stupid and stuff and it like makes me tired and did you see what Kim Kardashian just tweeted! Looks like a perfect way to promote Attention Deficit Disorder as a positive lifestyle choice.
- I didn’t think of it first! But it’s got me thinking of the NEXT BIG THING: HyperLocalNanoBlogging. The rules: 20 characters max, numbers permitted but no vowels. We’ll call these small messages toots. Sample toot from @BrtnySprs: “00ps 1 f0rg0t 2 p00”. Still working on what’s hyper or local about the whole thing, but I’ll get there (suggestions welcome). People can post their own toots, reply using burps, or send private messages via…. Better not give too much away just yet. You have to admit, hyperlocalnanoblogging just screams hip and au courant. Angel investors, feel free to contact me for more details.
Then there’s other potential roadblocks to getting engaged with Twitter, like finding the time for it, wondering who would care about mundane aspects of someone’s life, etc. Regardless, I’m settled in now, got TweetDeck all columned up, and getting reasonably proficient and productive. And, most notably, I’m actually getting a lot of value from it.
So what can you expect from Twitter? In August 2009, Pear Analytics looked at 2,000 US-based tweets over a 2-week period and came up with the following categorizations:
Net-Net: 41% of tweets are “Pointless Babble”, whereas 9% “Pass Along Value”. Not so promising. Perhaps things have evolved since August 2009 and the signal to noise ratio is increasing, or I’m just getting lucky and finding the right 9%. More exploration required.
L8tr f0lks,
@FrnkBttstn
