Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

Just as the majority of webusers have probably suspected, most Twitter Tweets are pointless babble. Only 8.7% had any value.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8204842.stm

One wonders how long it will be before the average user is bored with this phenomenon.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

Scientists in 'night follows day follows night' shocker ... would be a more interesting and surprising item. :erm: :D

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

one person's 'pointless babble' is another person's... well I don't know, but I do chuckle often and actually enjoy twitter and many of the tweets. If you get lots of pointless /uninteresting ones then block the person :doh:

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

So all of us who aren't Twitterers can pat ourselves on the back and carry on with Facebook.:D

Surely value can only be measured against what the individual considers value?

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

About 90% of 'Tweets' are people posting the SAME news story. It gets old quick.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

I opened a Twitter account (for some reason I can't remember) almost as soon as it was created, I then had a look round, considered it a waste of time and haven't been back since. :)

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

I think I say enough in the forums so twitter for me would be overkill :D

I do though use facebook but mainly a a way of keeping track of nieces/nephews 150miles away

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

Ditto.

I like forums. You can take your time to think about a reply. There's enough random noise in real life, I certainly don't need to listen to the rest of the world rabbiting on endlessly.

It's all about signal to noise ratio for me and twittery things just have too much noise.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

This is a stupid study though because people do not use Twitter in a random fashion. Picking 2000 posts at random and deciding it's mostly rubbish does not represent the true usage of Twitter.

People subscribe to interesting people, those who do generate good content, and also during News Stories/Events when they do the hash tags. I better way to do this would be to priotise content from the power users and see the content quality then.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

It's not stupid at all. The only statistically valid way to assess the entire contents of the twitter tweet stream is to randomly sample it.

And what exactly is the 'true' usage of Twitter? Obviously you think it's people like Stephen Fry and those who follow him, but how is that the 'true' usage if Fry's tweets and people's replies to them constitute only a tiny fraction of the whole?

The 'true' usage is the entirety of what it is used for, warts and all.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

Already bored of Twitter.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

It's like saying the Internet is mostly rubbish. While it may be technically true it is not a valid way of looking at it because the rubbish does not get attention while the good does.

The consistent twitter users usually following interesting people. I follow Stephen Fry, a few other celebrities whom I find interesting and a few famous/influential programmers who tweet relevant and interesting information.

I don't subscribe to Joe-whats-his-name who posts this daily activities for none to see. I would bet that few people subscribe to these tweets.700,000 people subscribe to Stephen Fry. No one follows random people posting random content.

Which is why the study is pointless, they should follow the content that is getting seen rather than randomly pick out content from anywhere.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

I "have" twitter - but it's just not doing it for me - who cares what I'm as a normal person, is doing...

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

TweetDeck helps make it more enjoyable.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

Twitter drove me mad, i used it for a few days but the ammount of useless posts people make... e.g. Im going for a coffee, im going to the loo, i have a new zit on my nose and im sat there thinking Do people really want to know this nonsense?

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

Actually the internet is mostly pr0n ... apparently. :erm: Most of the rest of it is rubbish. Most of what's not rubbish is on Cable Forum. :D

Look, I can see this study has offended you in some way. Clearly you're a big Twitter fan. But you need to take a step back and look at what it's actually saying. They're not claiming that Twitter is of no use or should be taken offline. They are simply observing that most tweets are pointless. What you then do with that information is up to you, but there is absolutely nothing invalid about this study, regardless of how much you wish they hadn't done it.

For example, one of the justifications the BBC seems to be offering for its seemingly endless coverage of Twitter (especially in the dotlife blog) is the massive popularity Twitter enjoys. If a lot of people use it, so the argument goes, then it's something a major news organisation should devote coverage to. However, if it transpires that only a small fraction of tweets are of any worth, when measured by a reasonable set of values, that calls into question all the hype the service is currently getting. Exactly how useful is Twitter, beyond a few very rare, very high-profile news stories such as this one that happened in Paisley yesterday?

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

I pretty much use Twitter simply to feed my Facebook Status, most of what I post is probably pointless to people who dont know me, but its things my family & friends like to know.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

I think Damien's point is entirely valid. In the way you put it, the study answers a question in a valid manner. However, the question is stupid. The comparison with the internet is spot on. It's probably fair to say that 90% of the web is rubbish, but that doesn't make the web rubbish, as the remaining 10% is extremely useful.

By simply taking a random sample of tweets, they are completely ignoring the fact that most of these tweets are not followed by anyone (as well as their context presumably). To arrive at a meaningful statement about Twitter, they'd at least have to weight tweets for the number of followers. As it stands, the study is little more than a meaningless sound-bite.

I don't use Twitter btw.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

I am not 'offended' just annoyed at another pointless study being released that means nothing because they asked the wrong question. It's a weird measurement of a usefulness of the technology because it doesn't measure how people use it.

As I said the Internet could be argued to be useless if your use case was to pick sites at random. You could not do this though, you would go the the big names, and the high ranking sites. Just like people follow the big names and the popular posters or topics on twitter.

If a study came out and said most e-mail was spam and this was covered in a "is e-mail really that useful" way you would rightfully be perplexed because they missed the point. As with the Internet, as with Twitter, as with forum posts, you filter out the banality and go for the quality.

This study reminds me of the one a few weeks ago where they, shockingly, found out teenagers are not big users of Twitter. The undercurrent of the story was that maybe it wasn't as good or as 'cool', a stupidly subjective phrase, as people think. However since when were teenagers the sole judges of the usefulness or quality of technology/websites/content?

Facebook was made popular by Students, then young adults, before teenagers flocked in droves from (relative failures) Bebo and MySpace. They are actually pretty poor predictors of technological trends and the study reinforced a false perception that this wasn't the case.

These are just stupid studies designed to fill column inches and nothing more.

Re: Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here
 

Go back and read the article again - the study does not claim to be an assessment of the usefulness of the technology. It simply seeks to quantify what it is being used for. These are two entirely different things.

But you didn't say that earlier. Your earlier analogy with reference to the Internet (of which Twitter, incidentally, is a sub-set, seeing as all Twitter data is carried across the Internet) postulated that someone might claim most of the internet is rubbish. Categorising content as rubbish is not the same thing as regarding the medium itself as useless. Your earlier analogy was spot on, just not in the way you meant it to be. But now you've shifted your position somewhat.

Again, you've shifted your argument from usefulness of content to usefulness of the medium that carries the content. However, filtering out the banality is, in part, what the published study on Twitter was about. The researchers wanted to quantify how much banality there is, and how much quality there is.

That raw data can then be usefully employed to answer any number of further questions. Or rather, it could be, if we stopped arguing about the initial data collection and started analysing the data instead.

I'm not sure that this has any relevance to the current topic other than your apparent assertion that it does.

Again, an assertion that isn't true just because you say it is.