Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here

MovedGoalPosts · 17-08-2009, 15:27

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.

**Chris** · 17-08-2009, 15:47

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

lauzjp · 17-08-2009, 15:51

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

**Maggy** · 17-08-2009, 17:00

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

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

SB_07 · 17-08-2009, 17:27

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

Mick Fisher · 17-08-2009, 18:00

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.

Kymmy · 17-08-2009, 18:22

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

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

Dai · 17-08-2009, 19:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mick Fisher

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.

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.

**Damien** · 17-08-2009, 22:24

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.

**Chris** · 18-08-2009, 16:01

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.

AntiSilence · 18-08-2009, 16:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rob

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

Already bored of Twitter.

**Damien** · 18-08-2009, 22:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris

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.

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.

webcrawler2050 · 19-08-2009, 01:36

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

Jimmy-J · 19-08-2009, 01:54

TweetDeck helps make it more enjoyable.

Welshchris · 19-08-2009, 05:47

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?