[LINK] Pointless twitter, search engine wars and why didn't yahoo take off in Oz?

[Stilgherrian]

On 19/08/2009, at 1:41 PM, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
>> Twitter is used mostly for pointless babble, than as a  
>> conversational or
>> 'pass-along value' medium. A study has revealed that around 40.55  
>> percent of the
>> total tweets can be classified as "pointless babble" or the "I am  
>> eating a
>> sandwich now" tweets.
> <http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Pointless_Babble_tops_Twitter_usage__-nid-60397.html 
> >

That "research" was a piece of rubbish designed to pimp a product, and  
completely missed the social growing / phatic communication aspects.  
There's been LOTS written debunking it, including these first two  
articles of mine and a lot of commentary.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/08/18/twitter-%E2%80%9C40-pointless-babble%E2%80%9D-what-twaddle/
http://stilgherrian.com/human-nature/twitter-babble-twaddle/

http://stephendann.com/2009/08/15/pear-analytics-twitter-report-criticisms-of-the-coding-methods/
http://dougclow.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/pointless-babble/
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/08/16/twitter_pointle.html

As an aside, one of the researchers on the Pear Analytics "research"  
was Sarah Monahan, who played the daughter "Jenny" in the long-running  
TV sitcom "Hey Dad...!". FWIW.

Stil



P.S. I don't usually pimp my Crikey articles or blog posts here.  
Should I? Or is that too tacky?


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