Ramblings

Bloviating: to you, from me. Chide me if you will. algot@runeman.org

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Mon, 20 Jul 2009

Twitter Followers

Once more, I ponder the Web 2.0 "value" of Twitter. It is certainly interactive. I try to post something regularly. I am finding one-liners are a good sort of thing for me, especially when they represent my enjoyment of play with words. You may, of course check my Twitter page to see examples.

Gathering a set of followers is gratifying, but I wonder about the quality of the followers. How focused are they on me? Are they actually just trying to goad me into following them?

Even more confusing about followers is their validity. Take the following email notice from today

Say hello to "Josephine Baker"

Not only is Josephine Baker oddly choosing an avatar with distinctly male look, but "she" also is following 1412 people (note that the profile page says she/he is following 1825 people). Just how does that work? How many of those being followed post more than once a day? If they all do, that is, using the first value of 1412 being followed, 2824 messages for Josephine to read. At an average of 100 out of 140 possible characters, that is 282,400 characters for Josephine to read. Assuming only an average five letter word length with a trailing space, that's a bit over 47,000 words to read every day if Josephine actually "follows" her Twitter sources.

Now, I am a reader. I try to get through a novel a week, sometimes more. A quick search of the Web suggests an "average" novel is around 100,000 words. Given that, Josephine would be reading from Twitter, the equivalent of about four average novels a week. Remember, these Twitter posts are not connected as the words of a novel. They pop up on screen in no more than 140 word chunks, acting more like paragraphs than anything else by being separated from the preceding and subsequent posts by white space. That many unrelated paragraphs would be difficult for me to read with any speed. Comprehension? Extracting value through consideration of the writer's content? Well, that seems doubtful to me.

Another quick Web search suggests an average of 200-250 words a minute. So a good reader probably reads better than that, say 400 words per minute. No, lets jump up to 500 WPM for easier calculation.

Going back to our 47,000 words a day...at 500 words a minute...that's a bit more than 1 1/2 hours a day devoted to reading Twitter. I don't really believe it, and I guess I fail to see much value to me to have a person who follows 1412 people adding little old me to their list.

Onomatopoeia

Click click, clap clap, clink clink, clip clop, clank clank, clunk clunk, clatter.
These are words doing their best to replicate the noise they try to represent. This morning a car drove by us; its front and rear tires caught the edge of a manhole cover as we walked the dogs through our neighborhood.

Don't you love the sound of words?

Small Step

Forty years have passed since Neil Armstrong took his "small step" onto the surface of the moon. I read on today's Astronomy Picture of the Day that it is estimated that one fifth of the world's population was either watching the television images or listening on radio back in July of 1969. This was truly the "moon walk" we need to remember today.