Twitter hype punctured by study | Hacker News Reader

Twitter hype punctured by study

news.bbc.co.uk

18 pointspierrefar7 comments

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.

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.

Yeah, I don't use Twitter for news. I unfollow people who tweet as if they're little breaking reporters. Who the hell cares about what other people consider news?

It's for people who care about relationships, not the hype cycle or news (altho those can be kinds of relationships).

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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