The case against Twitter

Perhaps not a meltdown on the order of 8-tracks and Citizens Band radios, but Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider points out some obvious problems:

10%
The percentage of users that account for 90% of all Twitter messages, according to the Harvard Business Review.

60%
The percentage of Twitter users that quit the site after a month, according to Nielsen estimates. The stat may be skewed by people who use Twitter via SMS or desktop clients like TweetDeck.

74
The number of days the average Twitter user goes between sending a Twitter message, according to the Harvard Business Review.

51%
The percentage of people with Twitter accounts don't use the service at all even once a month, according to All Things D.

Steven Johnson tries to lay out the positives in a piece at Time.com headlined "How Will Change the Way We Live." Not sure I'm convinced.

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

[CUT]

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

He says "the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it." Okaaay. Check out the comments of Twitter CEO Evan Johnson (above).