The Average Person Can’t Figure Out Twitter

Posted by Nick O'Neill on October 31st, 2008 4:08 PM

I’ve been taking a look at the usage of many Twitter users over the past few weeks and I’ve also noticed that a lot more of my friends have been joining recently. While Twitter can be an extremely valuable tool, there is a serious hurdle for it. I’ve seen many users join the site, add 10 or 20 friends and start tweeting. Within a matter of weeks their tweeting frequency dies down and eventually they stop using it.

The biggest problem for these individuals? The 10 or 20 people that they follow need to be interesting enough for them to return to the site regularly. While a small segment of these individuals enjoy getting text message updates from their close friends, at a certain point receiving mundane updates from the average Joe simply fails to excite.

Then again, perhaps following the average Joe (or should I say “Joe the plumber”?) will not provide a lot of value. The real value comes out of following those individuals that can create the most engaging media within 140 characters. Many of my friends don’t understand why I tweet and they don’t have the same virtual friends that I do.

There’s an extremely engaging group of individuals on the site that understand its power and take advantage of it. Maybe I’m simply over analyzing the act of engaging with other people on Twitter. Any individual who isn’t “hyperconnected” is not going to benefit equally and I would argue is much more likely to eventually leave the site. Do you think the average person gets the same benefit from Twitter as the hyperconnected social media people do?

Is there a simple way to explain the benefits of Twitter to someone who doesn’t understand what the purpose is? Personally, I didn’t get a huge benefit until I travelled around and began to witness the benefit of following the behind the scenes chatter.

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public speaking training 1 week ago 1 point
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A good explanation of Twitter but I think we should use existing social network like EZDIA (search on Google) . As here you not only do social networking but can build and grow your own network professionally, can do freelancing and lot more. Thus providing the features of all other sites like twitter , elance , linkedin etc at one place. And make your task easier as compare with going to various sites for a single purpose.

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john 1 month ago 1 point
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Twitter is lame. It is just another way for advertisers to harass.

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praneeth 1 year ago 1 point
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Perfect, the real value of twitter comes from whom you follow and how they use twitter. are they adding too much noise? are they active on it?? It actually take quite some time to understand how microblogs works

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Paul Roberts 1 year ago 1 point
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I use Twitter for two purposes: as another source of information, tapping into the rich and deep knowledge base of the 'masters of the web'; and toe experience living life online. it has its frustrations, but the weak relationships work for me just as much if not more than Twitter relationships with people I have met face-to-face.

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http://conem.wordpress.com

Bill Sodeman 1 year ago 1 point
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I use Twitter, but I'm on FriendFeed much more often. Twitter has a lot of noise and very few filters. FriendFeed has much better filters.

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12 /people/billso/ /people/billso/following/ http://billso.com/ in/billso/ billso billso

Ray Capece 1 year ago 1 point
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Good observation, Nick. One way Twitter might break through to mainstream use is connecting family and friends. Since most early adopters are young, they haven't gotten to appreciate (as I have) children who tweet. Parents' lament: "You never call, you never write [email]." So we really appreciate 'Got my license after 3 hours at DMV today' and other such trivia (not to mention seeing their icon :)

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http://bit.ly/venturefiles

Jamie Scheu 1 year ago 1 point
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Here's a pretty good YouTube video I came across recently, explaining Twitter (and its uses/benefits) in plain english:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o

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http://www.scheuguy.com/

mojaam 1 year ago 1 point
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My twitter usage just increased lately mostly due to the popularity of it and the elections. CNN uses it to engage with their viewers. I was surprised to see my tweet on it actually. But yeh, unless you have engaging mutual friends or you are important/famous enough, it doesn't offer much. Even if you do have friends, I feel Plurk is a much better platform to have those conversations. You can still learn a lot from what others are saying by subscribing to search results or using the many tools created for twitter.

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4 /people/mojaam/ /people/mojaam/following/ http://mojaam.tumblr.com http://twitter.com/mojaam