The Relevance of Twitter

This has been a Twitter heavy semester for me, and admittedly for a while I was thinking something along the lines of "you know, does anyone actually use this tool for anything beyond mindless banter?" A few people have questioned the relevance of Twitter to my face. The usual refrain goes something like "you know Twitter is talked about a lot, but I don't think anyone actually uses it for anything useful." Then there might be a mention of the much lower retention rate of Twitter vis-a-vis Facebook (the two are always compared though I'm not entirely sure why considering that Facebook is a social networking tool and Twitter is a micro-blogging tool. Different things.)

Leslie Carr, on his blog RepositoryMan recently confessed to having similar doubts about the utility of Twitter asking himself if it wasn't just "some gratuitous teenager technology?" So he conducted a study. At a recent CETIS conference, Carr used the Twitter API to aggregate all of the tweets from the conferees. From these tweets he wanted to determine how many of the tweets were either, on the one hand, "technical/academic/professional," and on the other, "personal/informal/gossipy." Although he created other categories for the tweets, Carr was clearly interested in quantitatively studying the relative "significance" of the informational value of the tweets from the CETIS conference.

From his analysis, Carr determined that 70% of the tweets provided the sort of "informational" value that he was looking for and that about 41% of the conference attendees contributed tweets that were either "entirely" or "mainly" informational. Carr doesn't go too in-depth into what the criteria according to which he determined the relative informational value of the tweets, though he did admit that "useful information" was information that was useful "to him."

It's an interesting study, though after reading this post, I have to say that it seems that even the tweets which Carr did not think had "informational value" (e.g., tweets about the poor quality of wireless connectivity at the conference) could be very useful for other audiences. The conference organizers might have found the gripey tweets about the wireless issues very useful, as do businesses which are now mining Twitter for information regarding reactions to their products. The take-away from reading this study, for me, was actually that tweets can provide useful information to any Twitter user given the right circumstances and conditions. This is not to say that I think every tweet is useful. Tweets about Megan Fox can almost always be ignored. Although, I don't know. Maybe in twenty years, a Media Studies or Gender Studies researcher might even find the Megan Fox tweets to be of some value.