Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Twitter: Pointless Babble? I Say No.

Back in February, I wrote that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to join the Twitter party, or watch from the sidelines I decided to join the party soon after those comments, and I have a two Twitter accounts. My family and friends have still stayed off the Twitter bandwagon, however. I use Twitter to keep people up to date on my blogs, and I have to admit that I find it a quick, easy way to keep up on what other people are doing. (The real time search is also great.)

A recent study by Pear Analytics says that 40% of the tweets are “pointless babble.” I ask – is this really a problem? I thought the whole point of Twitter was quick and brief communication, not about high quality content. While I don’t tell people what I am doing every minute of the day, I have to say that I enjoy some of the “pointless babble” that goes on out there, some of which actually put an interesting spin on the mundane. Sometimes I will just look at some of my followers and whom they follow, and delve into their tweets just to get a snapshot of what is going on in the world. Some of it is silly, but a lot that may appear to be pointless babble really may make sense if you look at the person’s tweets over a period of time.

The full breakdown of categories measured by Pear Analytics are as follows, in case you are interested:

Total News 3.69%
Total Spam 3.75%
Total Self Promotion 5.85%
Total Pointless Babble 40.55%
Total Conversational 37.55
Total Pass Along Value 8.70



My only complaint about Twitter is that they certainly seem to have capacity issues, downtime issues, and security issues. But content issues – I have no problem at all with pointless babble. It's a lot like how my own mind works!


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4 comments:

Michael said...

What's your twitter account?

The Frequent Critic said...

My Twitter page is here, under my "all law and order" name:

http://twitter.com/Alllawandorder

The link is on my Frequent Critic blog, on the right side, towards the bottom where it says "Follow all my blogs on Twitter."

Michael said...

Excellent, thanks, just followed. I guess it wouldn't have hurt to review the page myself and find it, I thought it would be somewhere on the blog, but just overlooked it.

Anonymous said...

I have researched the Twitter "pointless babble" recently and have seen three different sides including: 1) waste of time,no one wants to read this junk 2) a fun social networking oppertunity 3)they feel that twitter does consist of a lot of pointless babble but feel it is humorous to read and that it doesn't devalue them by reading it as long as they are not posting it. My opinon goes comparably with the third opinion that it is the poster who is de valuing themselves , not the reader. The reader can read babble, but post intellegent and opinonated pieces or use the site for self promotion. Twitter cannot help un-useful users devalue the site. More people will just have to begin using or up their “tweet- age” to overtake the pointless babble.