HomeAn interesting post by Anil Dash:
Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers
Meaning, no one on Twitter has a million followers that actually pay attention to what they Tweet about.
The post in short: Dash was added to Twitter’s Suggested User List, an arbitrary list of Twitter-users that are suggested by default to new users when they sign up. As a result he saw his number of followers skyrocket. However, Dash notes here that, “Being on Twitter’s suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.” In other words, that huge list of followers is meaningless because the overwhelming majority of those supposedly following him are not paying attention to a thing he says.
At first I found this surprising, but now that I’ve given it some thought I guess it shouldn’t be. It’s true of a lot of other online phenomenons. Facebook users: how many of you have two hundred friends or more? Those of you who have raised your hands, how many of those two hundred “friends” would you call up on any given day to see how they’ve been? Or ask out to lunch? Ten? Twenty? At most? With the recent updates to Facebook’s interface, how many people on your friend list are “hidden” on your Newsfeed, for all purposes making them invisible?
It’s essentially the same deal. Volume doesn’t necessarily (or even usually, I should say) translate to connectivity.
Now let me just say that Twitter has proven to be far less useless than I originally thought it would be. As a tool for getting real-time information on what’s happening in Iran out to the rest of the world these past six months it has proven invaluable. But a revolutionary new forum for connecting on the Internet at large–what it was initially made out to be–it most certainly is not. It has its uses for connecting small groups of people with like-minded interests in the same way that Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Google Groups, blogs, and seemingly just about everything else on the web does.
Beyond that, it’s purely a useless time sink–as is Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Google Groups, blogs, and seemingly just about everything else on the web is.