Thinking About Twitter, Influence and Too Much Signal
March 2nd, 2009, 14 Comments »
I tried to write this post a couple of times, but faltered. So, I figured I’d try to articulate myself using video. The result, I’m afraid, is really no better. Remember–that’s four minutes of your life you can’t have back.
Building on what I ramble about in the video, consider the example of somebody receiving 1000 tweets a day. Let’s imagine that they actually read 200 of those. The other 800 just float by in the endless Twitter river while they’re working, interacting with other humans and so forth.
If each person in their Twitter network posts 10 times per day, then, on average, 2 out of 10 of each person’s tweets get seen.
Now imagine that the size of the average network doubles, to 200. That means 2000 tweets a day. The user still only sees an average of 200, so only 1 out of 10 tweets get seen.
Everything increases but our attention bandwidth. Is there some kind of threshold where the river o’ Twitter becomes too diluted? If the average follower count continues to go up, will we someday rely almost exclusively on DMs and @ messages? Or, as I speculate about in the video, will we just get better at filtering and personalization?
Sources for the video are a comment from a Twitterholic founder on Kottke, HubSpot’s State of the Twittersphere and an article in The Economist.