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Folks love complaining about Twitter, so here's something to chew on

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8089508.stm

Micro-blogging service Twitter remains the preserve of a few, despite the hype surrounding it, according to research.

Just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content, a Harvard study of 300,000 users found.

On a typical online social network, he said, the top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production.

"This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network," the team wrote in a blog post.

However, the Harvard team found that more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days.

And most people only ever "tweet" once during their lifetime, the researchers found.

Earlier this year, the firm found that more than 60% of US Twitter users failed to return the following month.

"The Harvard data says very, very few people tweet and the Nielsen data says very, very few people listen consistently," Mr Heil told BBC News.

"Twitter is a broadcast medium rather than an intimate conversation with friends," he said.

"It looks like a few people are creating content for a few people to read and share."

"The Twitter management need to decide if this is a problem," said Mr Heil.

"And if they decide it is, how they will tweak Twitter to become more acceptable to the average user?"

As someone who's a passive listener on Twitter, I have found it useful as a kind of 'RSS feed' of things, and for following people who use it more to share things they found on the web. But it's not without its problems in that guise, using it as just a listening post..it's not really what it was designed for.

I dunno..maybe people aren't as egoistic as we all first thought? Maybe most people don't really like just talking about themselves and what they're doing?

Perhaps the lack of context when it comes to tweeting, outside of yourself, makes it difficult for most people to know what to tweet at a given point in time?

I wonder how much churn Twitter really has..it's had great growth recently, but I wonder how much of it's sticking. If traffic figures are being fueled predominantly by a lot of new people coming, looking, and going away - they'll eventually run out of new people to try it and have to come to rely on repeat users to keep traffic figures up.

 

[Visualante]

Twitter stocks nooooo

 

[Keyser Soze]