Twitter

I apologize in advance if I’m even less coherent than usual.  I’m not feeling any better this morning so, like a tweet, I’m going to keep this brief (although way more than 140 characters.)

There is lots of Twitter chatter this morning or, to be more accurate, chatter about Twitter.  This comes on the heels of a couple of recent reports and, frankly, is much ado about nothing in my mind.

The first is a report from Harvard that says the only 10% of the users generate 90% of the content while on a typical social network, he said, the top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production.  The second is a report that Twitter’s growth rate, which was only up 1.5% last month, has flat-lined and speculation that maybe the microblogging service has jumped the shark.

My take is this.  Ive been on Twitter for quite a while (and I hope you’re following me if you are – promise to follow back!) and I still don’t think I fully appreciate it.  Like any new tool it takes a while to figure out the best way to use it.  The standard Twitter interface is definitely NOT that way.  Tweetdeck or any one of the other interfaces make the service more coherent, less spammy, and more useful (if you’re using Firefox, plug in Power Twitter and see how the experience changes).  After all, Twitter itself is a platform, one whose real-time search capabilities are unparalleled.

My point here is that I tweet more now than I used to.  I try to add value with each tweet (and don’t always succeed, I know) although the shout-outs over the weekend tend to be way less formal.  I suspect that most new users have the same experience – they’re either overwhelmed and quit or they are just silent lurkers, subscribing to the feeds of friend and celebrities that interest them but not saying very much.  Obviously the 20 percentage point difference in activity might be something that is affected by the huge amount of spam that is generated on the service.  I suspect if you took away that crap the percentage of real members contributing goes up a lot.

The “flatline” is not a big deal.  Twitter now has 19,728,619 monthly visitors who visit 134,536,240 times, a numb I suspect is low given the number of ways one can access a Twitter feed.  If Twitter were a magazine, it would have the second highest US circulation (behind the AARP‘s magazine).  Perspective is a wonderful thing no?

Are you on Twitter?  Do you find it useful?  Do you think the hype is over and it fades away?