Flawed But Interesting Harvard Study on Twitter
Harvard Business Review just released a fascinating study on Twitter. The only problem is, it’s completely unreflective of my own experience. This is the comment I left:
“Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool?”
It is all of the above and much, much more. And it lends itself much more to qualitative than quantitative research–because each individual user’s experience of Twitter is entirely different depending on who they follow, what times of day they log on, and how much time they spend.
Thus, while this aggregate study offers some very interesting data, it’s hard to know what subset of Twitter users the data applies to.
To me, this very idiosyncratic experience is actually part of Twitter’s charm. I’m following over 800 people, and that means I see little snatches of conversations and threads, different each time I log on (typically, a few times a day for just a few minutes each time). While some prolific Tweeters (Guy Kawasaki among them) show up regularly, the randomness of who’s in my window leads me in all sorts of wonderful new directions. I often say I became a writer because I’m interested in practically everything, and in 140 character-bytes (and their associated links), I get to satisfy those interests in little bits and pieces.
In fact, I must have incorporated research from 20 different articles I first found on Twitter into my next book.
