{"id":1653,"date":"2009-10-01T04:23:07","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T11:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/?p=1653"},"modified":"2009-10-01T10:30:37","modified_gmt":"2009-10-01T17:30:37","slug":"going-totally-random-with-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/going-totally-random-with-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"Going Totally Random With Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The most frequent criticism of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.twitter.com\/\">Twitter <\/a>that I hear is that the service is a waste of time. It\u2019s all about people telling the world what they had for breakfast or how long they\u2019ve been waiting for a bus. Don\u2019t we have better things to do?<\/p>\n<p>I decided to try a short experiment. I clipped a 100-tweet block from my Twitter stream at random and examined the contents to see just how much useful content there was, if any.<\/p>\n<p>A little background first: I follow about 1,150 people and I prune my list with some care. If someone\u2019s tweets are completely irrelevant to my interests, I unfollow that person. I only follow people who interest me or who send me a personal request asking me to follow them. That weeds out the spammers and bots.<\/p>\n<p>Here are my results<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> 42% of the tweets were what I\u2019d call random. These were mostly along the lines of what people had for breakfast or ongoing conversations I hadn&#8217;t followed.<\/li>\n<li> 12% contained news of general interest (BTW, Twitter has been one of the best places to monitor the ongoing news of the Samoan tsunami this week).<\/li>\n<li> 33% were      referral links to information that the writer found interesting.<\/li>\n<li> 7% were      notable quotes.<\/li>\n<li> 6%      were either self-promotional messages or requests for advice.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Two statistics interested me in particular. One was that 45% of the tweets contained a link. This indicates that Twitter is used at least as much to point friends to interesting information as it is to comment on everyday activities. After all, you can&#8217;t link to what you had for breakfast. The other is that at least 20 of the tweets interested me enough that I wanted to learn more.<\/p>\n<p>This wasn&#8217;t the kind of reading I would find on a typical news website. Here\u2019s a sampling:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cSubjects      of news coverage now try to write the stories themselves using pro      journalists. <a href=\"https:\/\/is.gd\/3OEDM\">https:\/\/is.gd\/3OEDM<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\u201c33      WordPress Plugins To Power Up Your Comment Section <a href=\"https:\/\/bit.ly\/2TIg9\">https:\/\/bit.ly\/2TIg9<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\u201cVideo      Viewing on the Rise: 161M Viewers, 25B Videos <a href=\"https:\/\/post.ly\/6nGL\">https:\/\/post.ly\/6nGL<\/a><\/li>\n<li>\u201cBlogger      Relations is a Two-Way Street <a href=\"https:\/\/ow.ly\/rLpL\">https:\/\/ow.ly\/rLpL<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span><span>&#8220;5 Ways to Make Your Business More Transparent. <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/url4.eu\/YZfM\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/url4.eu\/YZfM&#8221;<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It isn&#8217;t CNN.com, but then I don&#8217;t use Twitter for the same reason I use CNN. The bottom line is that the 4 1\/2 minutes it took me to read 100 tweets yielded at least 20 items of interest. There are other places on the Web where I could consume more information in less time, but it\u2019s a different kind of information. It\u2019s not less valuable, just different.<\/p>\n<p>Newspaper and magazine editors often complain that the rise of customized news services has shortchanged readers by removing the element of discovery that a printed publication delivers. However, the Twitter stream and Facebook news feed deliver just as much surprise and delight as any professional media entity, if not more. The only difference: the recommendations come from people I know instead of professional editors.<\/p>\n<p>It turns out that avid Web users are just as interested in discovery as print readers. It&#8217;s just that they\u2019ve found a faster, less intrusive, more personal and more ecologically friendly way to go about it. Is it any wonder mainstream media is dying?<\/p>\n<p><input id=\"gwProxy\" type=\"hidden\" \/> <input id=\"jsProxy\" onclick=\"jsCall();\" type=\"hidden\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most frequent criticism of Twitter that I hear is that the service is a waste of time. It\u2019s all about people telling the world what they had for breakfast or how long they\u2019ve been waiting for a bus. Don\u2019t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/going-totally-random-with-twitter\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[4,17,25,31],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pTy95-qF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1653"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1653"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1655,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1653\/revisions\/1655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}