Having said that, I never used Formspring and didn't know anyone who ever had.
Yeah, lies, damn lies and statistics ;-) I rarely ever saw a formspring Q&A that was bustling with activity while it was quite the opposite for Instagram. Not sure I like that, though, but I guess that's human nature.
They claim 4 billion posts - would be interesting to see the Q to A ratio.
When you ask a question on Twitter, how many of your followers respond? Very few. The nature of both sites is obviously different, but the engagement on Formspring remains pretty good.
Also, there’s only so many times you can answer a question about your favorite movie, or where you met your husband/wife before it gets boring. Original questions (with photos, links, tags) get a far higher response rate.
You really think 5/1 is bad?
Me asking 1Q to 5 users results in 5Q being delivered to the respective users. Out of 5, and depending on the quality of the question, the level of activity of these users, generally results in 1 to 2 responses.
Obviously the engagement is specific to the user asking the question. Some popular users easily reach a 75% engagement rate.
Then, there was a rumor that Formspring was a huge fraud and was built as a complete joke and that they'd release the names of all the people who had posted questions on April Fool's. People freaked out and stopped posting, and those who had Formsprings released that they were happier without Formspring.
This is obviously a very microscopic look, but it wouldn't surprise me if Formspring did achieve the numbers they reported. I didn't know any peers of mine who didn't have one, back in the day and the "popular kids" at my school got hundreds of questions a week about everything.