Twitter’s 140-character limit not enough? Try Woofer’s 1,400-character minimum

August 25th, 2009 • Fun, Publishing
Tags: macroblogging, microblogging, social media marketing, twitter

For anyone too garrulous for Twitter, please meet Twitter’s evil twin: the macroblogging site, Woofer.

Is Twitter Pointless Babble or A Legitimate Communications Tool?

August 17th, 2009 • Behaviors, Social Networks, Studies & Research
Tags: Gizmodo, microblogging, Pear Analytics, twitter

With Twitter being the shiny new penny of the social media world, many are eager to find out how people are actually using the microblogging platform.

Pear Analytics, a data analytics company, studied the content of tweets to find out how people are really using Twitter. The Pear Analytics group took 2,000 tweets in English from the public timeline over a time span of two weeks, with 200 tweets captured each half-hour from 11am – 5pm CST daily. They then categorized tweets into six different types: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversation, and pass-along value.

The winner? Pointless babble tweets, with over one-third of all studied tweets fitting into the “I’m clipping my toenails” category. Conversational tweets came in a very close second with 37.55 percent. Pass-along value — or RTs — captured third-place with only 8.7 percent, but, interesting enough, spam only accounted for 3.75 percent of all tweets studied.

Other key findings:
- News tweets are heaviest at 2:00pm CST on Tuesdays
- Pass-along value tweets are most frequently seen at 11:30am CST on Mondays
- Spam tweets flow consistently all day, everyday
- Conversational tweets are heaviest on Tuesdays

Gizmodo recently published a blog post “If Only 100 People Were on Twitter”, with data visualization by Dave McCandless. What’s significant is that there are“5 loud mouths” per 100, or 5 percent of the folks who contribute 75 precent of the tweets. What does this mean? A handful of narcissistic people are contributing a significant amount of pointess babble to the Twitterverse.

As Twitter continues to develop, not only as a brand but as a communications platform, it’s likely that the usage trends will also evolve. Hopefully, the largest violaters of pointless babble will stick to Twitter’s inherent 140-character philosophy: Less is more.

Is was and has been on Facebook

November 20th, 2007 • Uncategorized
Tags: facebook, microblogging, Social Networks, status

Much excitement in the blogosphere today about news that Facebook is eliminating the requirement that users build their status updates around the word “is.”

Effective tonight, status entries such as Keith McArthur is blogging, Keith McArthur is tired and Keith McArthur is writing a press release can be replaced with gems like Keith McArthur blogs, Keith McArthur dreams of sleep and Keith McArthur shall save the world one press release at a time.

As Betsy Schiffman at Wired points out, some Facebookers chose to ignore the structure, leading to status entries such as Betsy is loves to dance.

Virtual champagne will no doubt flow tonight in Facebook groups like I die a little bit inside when I see grammatically incorrect status updates (411 members) and Facebook Petitition to Remove the World “IS” from the Status Updater (995 members).

Update: The is is still there. Betshy Schiffman reports that a note went out to developers last Monday saying it would disappear, but it (is) stubburnly refuses to die.