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Posts Tagged ‘Tweet’

Huge social shift: Cellphones now used more for data than calls

Posted by andreaitis on May 14, 2010

Phone Prop

Image by jennlynndesign via Flickr

We knew it was coming but now the numbers are in and  it’s official.

We’re well on our way to becoming an incredibly disconnected connected society.

Key stats from a New York Times story:

– Almost 90% of US households have a mobile phone

– Number of households eliminating landlines continues to increase

– Number of voice minutes used by consumers is flat

– Number of text messages sent per  user is up by almost 50%

– Thumb voted ‘favorite digit’ as thumb strength in overall US population is increasing (okay, that wasn’t in the NYT but it’s totally true, right?)

Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.

[…]

And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.

Of course, talking on the cellphone isn’t disappearing entirely. “Anytime something is sensitive or is something I don’t want to be forwarded, I pick up the phone rather than put it into a tweet or a text,” said Kristen Kulinowski, a 41-year-old chemistry teacher in Houston. And calling is cheaper than ever because of fierce competition among rival wireless networks.

via Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls – NYTimes.com

That chemistry teacher is onto something.  Don’t you agree, Mark Zuckerberg?

Meanwhile, I’m wondering what we lose by replacing talking with texting.    Is a typed exchange a less connected experience?   Does a verbal discussion translate to a deeper relationship?

We have shorter attention spans.  We consume more, more quickly.   We walk looking at our mobile devices rather than our surroundings.    We don’t make eye contact.   We don’t talk as much.  We hear less.

We are separated by a screen.

Status updates and text messages are the new soundbite.  Will that fill us up, or leave us empty?

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Posted in Business, technology | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

7 Million Twitter accounts and the sounds of silence

Posted by andreaitis on June 6, 2009

Web security firm Purewire just released an analysis of seven million Twitter accounts.   Techcrunch did some number-crunching:

What stands out from this data is that about a quarter of all accounts are not following anybody, nearly 30 percent have zero followers, and more than a third have not posted a single Tweet. The problem with all of this data, however, is that it includes abandoned accounts (as most likely does the Harvard data as well).

Like any popular Web service, millions of people create a Twitter account, try it once, and never come back again. The Purewire data shows that about 40 percent of users have not sent out a Tweet since the day they created their accounts. You can compare this with the 60 percent abandonment rate claimed by Nielsen. But even these may not be the true abandonment rates. Just because you are not Tweeting does not mean you are not listening.

via On Twitter, Most People Are Sheep: 80 Percent Of Accounts Have Fewer Than 10 Followers

Are these numbers surprising? Nope.  But the last sentence is key: Just because you are not Tweeting does not mean you are not listening.

In online communities — forums, message boards, even blogs — there has always been a common ratio of active vs passive users.   That ratio shows that you will, without a doubt, always find more lurkers than post-ers.  Many more people will engage passively than participate actively.  At AOL, this was a constant, sometimes by a huge margin of readers to post-er.

Does that mean the ‘readers’ aren’t participating?  Of course not.  The word ‘follower’ gets a bad rap. One doesn’t have to post Twitter messages to be an engaged user. The followers are out there, and they’re not going away.  That only increases the need for organization of content on Twitter through search, trending and grouping mechanisms.

Now, come follow me at twitter.com/andreaitis.

Posted in technology, twitter | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

New site calls out the twit-wits. And not in a good way.

Posted by andreaitis on May 20, 2009

The hate is on.  Or, perhaps, the mockery, snark and smirk.  Four pretty funny guys have launched Tweeting Too Hard, a site that brings us the “self-importance, pretense, braggadocio—it’s all here and it’s laid bare for the scoffing.”

It’s the Digg of twitter messages, where we in our self-righteous  right-ness get to vote on who’s twittering like a twit-wit.  Because, y’know, OUR twitter messages would certainly never appear there.  Um, right?  Sheesh.  As if we needed more pressure on a measly 140 characters…

Tweeting Too Hard

The concept is simple. You submit and vote for the most blatantly self-absorbed tweets that you see on Twitter. The most popular recent tweets get voted to the top. Like the million of other web sites that offer this sort of voting feature, you can also sort by “newly added,” “randoms,” and “today’s top.”

Tweeting Too Hard: A site for shaming the twitteringly self-important » VentureBeat

Posted in technology, twitter | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »