Everyone panic!

Some Harvard research has redefined twitter as something that many of its users already consider it to be. Rather than a two way nearly real time chit-chat client, it’s more of a broadcasting medium. In case you missed the statistics that came out yesterday, the Harvard Business Review revealed research that suggested most people on twitter don’t tweet. Over at the LVP blog the figures were taken as a cause for alarm:

The fact that half of twitterers have tweeted once or less, and that 75% of twitterers have tweeted four times or less is quite astonishing. It is consistent with Nielsen’s finding that 60% of Twitter users don’t come back the next month.

Surely the figures aren’t at all surprising, twitter accounts are very easy to set up, they’re not like facebook accounts or myspace accounts. People quickly put together false accounts for their friends and colleagues, tweet a few jokes, then drop the whole thing as though it never existed. They’re as disposable as lollipop sticks. Doing a random study of twitter accounts is in no way a random study of twitter users. What would happen if Harvard took a random study of 300,000 blogs? I would imagine the results would be similar, since one blog does not constitute one person.

All of the stats about how many people leave the service, how many don’t tweet and how many people don’t  have followers doesn’t take away from the fact that for the people using it, whether they just listen or they’re active, there is plenty on offer the service. A study I’d be interested to see would be a more qualitative one that asks people how they use twitter and what they get out of it. Amongst all the stats that show twitter is not what it appears, Nielson Online’s research suggests that the amount of time spent on twitter has risen 3,712 percent. That 10% really do have an engaged audience.

The rule of most making and the rest consuming is true in almost every aspect of our world. It’s the same with music, the same with blogs, with mainstream media, and probably your friends during conversations. They talk 90% of time time, and you squeeze in a word here or there.  Granted, it’s usually called the 80/20 rule, but I guess for the twitter crowd it’s the 90/10 rule, adjusted for difficult modern times.

Could we consider blog readers as blog users? Does the same rule apply here? What about newspaper readers as newspaper users? There’s got to be a clear distinction between what constitutes a reader and what constitutes a user. Sandra Vogel got it right when she said “Twitter ‘aint necessarily all it is cracked up to be. If, that is, it is cracked up to be a near-ubiquitous two-way chit-chat thing.”

Well maybe twitter isn’t cracked up to be a two-way chit-chat thing, it’s a platform for link sharing, note taking, and idea sharing. The days of people tweeting what they had for breakfast are long gone. That said, this morning Charlton Brooker tweeted, “If someone could invent a breakfast cereal containing caffeine and diclofenac, my current morning routine would be quicker.”

Don’t jump off the bandwagon just yet, twitter is going nowhere.