Thread: How "Social" Are You on Twitter?

According to a recent study, nearly 41% of messages on Twitter's social networking site are pointless babble. Here's a breakdown of the study:

• Pointless babble – 40.55%

• Conversational - 37.55%

• Pass along value - 8.70 %

• Self-promotion - 5.85%

• Spam – 3.75%

• News – 3.60&

Well I'm unsure what to say except that I grew up in Britain where it's the "norm" to talk about the weather, tube delays and such things. I just finished drinking a nice cup of green tea - you care, right? Oh and BTW check out this site and that site; you'll find some valuable information. Oh and one last thing did you hear the latest news…

How "social" are you?

nice post.. but i always tweet about conversational topics!

I'm not really sure researchers can distinguish the various categories, especially because things mean different things to different people.

For instance, if I tweet about a domain I have on auction, I think the researchers would categorize that as self-promotion. But for the people interested in the auction, that would be news. For friends, that would be conversation.

I agree w/ Jeff. Things mean different things to different people. Twitter is important, it's major, and it's not going away, but there's no reason to over analyze it. People use it for different reasons.

TIP: Twitter search is worth over-analyzing though

I think when we follow people on big T we get all their tweets and that crowds our message stream resulting in a sense of garbarge and the real important ones get buried.

To address the above problem I am planning to develop a Twitter client (interface) and appreciate your feedback. If you are willing to provide feedback please read on.

The Twitter client will be used to classify the people I follow and their messages based on my interest.

Example: Mr.X writes about travel, business and personal trivia (like my cat is napping). So, 1. Mr.X uses my Twitter to write his tweets and each time he can choose one or more categories to send it to followers of those specific categories, and 2. I can opt to receive Mr.X's tweets for specific categories.

As a result, though Mr.X tweets 100 times a day, if there is only 1 tweet about Travel and I have subscribed to his "Travel" category tweets, then I isn't spam for me. Additionally I can also go to my categories like Travel or Business and see all the messages specific to that category from various people I follow.

Do you think this is helpful to you? What are the pros and cons that you see to such a design?

Thanks in advance.

That sounds wonderful!

It took me a couple of minutes to figure this out - but for this application to work, both parties would need to be using it. So for the application to be successful, you'd need to get quite widespread adoption. Although given how useful that is, it may be quickly adopted if it's a free application.

Jeff, you are right that both parties would have to use this to be beneficial. If only the person who is tweeting uses the interface, then he knows he is keeping it streamlined and not spamming anybody, but there is no benefit to the person receiving the tweet. Converse is also true.

Yes, I am planning on it being free.

Good luck with it! Are you coding it yourself?

Thanks for the wishes Jeff, I need it.

No, I am not coding it myself...I am programming dodo - got extinct a decade ago! I hire developers through eLance.

Good luck with the Twitter application, msdomains.

Originally Posted by msdomains

I am programming dodo - got extinct a decade ago!

Extinct? Hey, welcome to my generation.