Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Not So Big Now, Eh Twitter?

Both Stephen's Lighthouse and Rough Type mention this Nielsen story about the fact that even though Twitter is growing by huge leaps and bounds as new people sign up every day, the site may not actually be retaining all those new sign-ups as regular users.

I recall similer stories about Second Life, back when it was the hot new thing: apparently it also had, among its vast armies of residents, millions of registered users who didn't log in regularly. (I sheepishly raise my hand here...I am presumably still a registered resident of SL, but can't be sure since I haven't signed in for months.)

Obviously there's nothing truly startling about the fact that a lot of people sign up for a trendy free service, and then don't wind up using it. (Heck, a lot of people reputedly sign up for expensive gym memberships every New Year's and then don't wind up using them.)

Signing up is how you try it out and see if you like it. If you don't like it, you let it drop, possibly without bothering to formally resign, since you never know, something might change and you might find it useful/fun/procrastenabling after all. Twitter is also pretty innocuous as a membership site: it doesn't really do anything if you don't use it.

If you had to pay for it every month, or if it constantly sent you reminders about itself, it might be more worth it to people to actually quit if they weren't using it, but as it is, why bother? There's no harm in setting up an account and then forgetting it.

No harm except THROWING OFF THE NUMBERS, that is. Horror!

This does probably mean that just because everyone in the world is apparently suddenly on Twitter, we shouldn't assume that all communication will be accomplished via this medium in the near future.

Here I was just about to take a vow of silence, too, but I suppose that had better wait until I can respond to questions at the reference desk with an imperous gesture toward my Twitter updates and not get politely removed from my job.

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