[lbo-talk] Twitter: >40% pointless babble

[Voyou]

On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 12:07 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Aug 13, 2009, at 11:57 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> 
> > But isn't >40% still less than the percentage in everyday  
> > conversation?
> 
> But that would be in a social context. Broadcasting the news to scores/ 
> hundreds/thousands that you are having a sandwich - or, as an  
> otherwise very smart and literate friend of mine once inexplicably  
> posted, "I just steamed some sugar snap peas" - is weird.

But Twitter users aren't usually broadcasting to hundreds or thousands
of people - the mean number of "followers" on Twitter is apparently 70
and the median is somewhere between 11 and 25 (http://bit.ly/7ij0 -
these are 2008 figures). That's a reasonable number of people to make up
a social context.

The categorizations in that report are also a bit odd, it seems to me,
restricting "tweets that try to engage followers in conversation" to
"questions or polls." But surely that "inexplicable" post about sugar
snap peas is as much an invitation to conversation (about sugar snap
peas) as asking "Do you like sugar snap peas?" would be.

-- 
Voyou <voyou1 at gmail.com>