Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
Actually the internet is mostly pr0n ... apparently.  Most of the rest of it is rubbish. Most of what's not rubbish is on Cable Forum. 
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. |
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.