Move Along Now, Nothing to Read Here

Originally Posted by Damien

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.

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.

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?

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.

[danielf]

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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