December 9th, 2010
Pew has just released the results of a survey on Twitter usage and they seem pretty surprising. For instance, if you had to guess, just from the hype, what percentage of American internet users–not total Americans, mind you, just those who are actively the web–use Twitter, what number would you say?
How about 8 percent.
As a raw number, that’s a lot of people. And good for Twitter. But 8 percent of internet users puts a damper on the notion that Twitter is everywhere.
Next up: demographics. Twitter users are disproportionately young–14 percent of internet users 18-29 use it. No surprise there. But how about this: Twitter users are also disproportionately black and hispanic. Only 5 percent of white internet users use Twitter; 13 percent of black internet users and 18 percent of hispanic internet users do. This is probably a function of internet usage among minorities being more heavily-concentrated among the young than it is in the general population. (Nota bene: I don’t know that this is true! I’m just proposing an explanation.)
Twitter users also tend to be more urban; it’s not clear if this is a driver or effect of the racial and ethnic data.
The other big surprise is that of those 8 percent of internet users who use Twitter, 41 percent–41 percent!–say that they check in with Twitter either “never” or less than once every couple weeks. That’s a pretty high attrition rate for a medium. I can’t imagine that, 15 years ago, 2 out of every 5 people who tried email eventually hopped off the bandwagon.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Twitter is the pet rock of the Internet age. The only question is whether some sucker will pay $250 billion for it before it becomes passe.*
(I wish Pew had asked the question Annenberg asked in July about whether or not Twitter users would be willing to pay for the service. You’ll recall that in the Annenberg study 0.0 percent–that is, not one single respondent, said they would be willing to pay for Twitter.)
*Unless everyone on Twitter turns their icons green–then the medium’s true power will be unleashed!
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well, the important thing is that even if only 8% of American internet users are on Twitter, the rate is more like 100% among Iranian Democracy — in English no less! or at least that’s the picture you get from people who need to have the phrase “no sampling on the dependent variable” tattooed on their foreheads.
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I find Twitter tedious. Who has time to read 140 characters? What are you, Tolstoy? Get to the point already dammit.
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Twitter is a useless timesuck except for following newsfeeds – it functions as a wire service substitute with greater speed than an RSS feed.
But that’s maybe .00001% of the activity on there, which is more like:
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Twitter’s success is based on the insight that people enjoy walking into conversations mid-sentence. That there are multiple conversations being witnessed simultaneously, all occurring at different tempos, is just icing on the cake.
Phil December 9, 2010 at 7:28 pm
Twitter is excellent for breaking news, especially sports. I follow a handful of my favorite college football writers and what they post is almost always interesting and informative (yes, even in 140-character bits).
Throw in some funny celebrities with pithy comments (Conan O’Brien), some funny novelty acts (God Damn Batman) and some funny or interesting writers (Lileks) and Twitter is worthwhile and entertaining every day, for me at least.