Twittering on regardless

The BBC Online News headline runs 'Twitter hype punctured by Study', but I'm not convinced that there has been any more hype for Twitter than there was for any other social web service. In fact I think that both Facebook and YouTube have grabbed more column inches that Twitter over the last year or two. The only hype I can recall is the fact that several high profile celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher have recently jumped on the bandwagon for some shameless self promotion. You can tell them a mile off - they have a million 'followers' and they follow exactly ... no-one.

So along comes a study from Harvard University which suggests that just 10% of users generate 90% of the content on Twitter. So what? With 10 million users (and growing), that would still be 1 million regular twitterers. And the trend is upwards. One of the crass claims of the Harvard study is that "most people only ever "tweet" once during their lifetime." Well 'most' is unquantifiable, and are these people all dead, now they have completed the questionnaire? That would be the only way to make sure they only tweeted once in their lifetimes, wouldn't it?

The part that really gets my goat though, is the flippant statement that "This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network." Well, that may be true of the celebrity bandwaggoners (a very small minority), but it certainly is far from the truth in my experience. Twitter is probably the richest social networking tool in terms of information sharing, conversation making, contact maintenance, social presence and immediacy. And there are many other affordances in the microblogging tool.

No, I'm not convinced that this study (which is a survey of 300,000 users) is actually saying anything useful or positive. Some people don't get Twitter and others only get it partially and use it in a limited manner. Potentially, Twitter is one of the most powerful social networking tools ever to have emerged from the so-called Web 2.0 - and I think it will stand the test of time. There is a large and growing body of tools that support Twitter, and already a vast amount of evidence to show that Twitter can be used inventively as a teaching and learning tool. It seems to me that from their tone, the Harvard researchers can be numbered amongst those people who simply 'don't get' Twitter.

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