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Originally Posted by Damien
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm not sure that this has any relevance to the current topic other than your apparent assertion that it does.
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These are just stupid studies designed to fill column inches and nothing more.
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Again, an assertion that isn't true just because you say it is.