Twitter: Has the novelty worn off?

Twitter has made real-time information commonplace

Seeing information stream in real-time isn’t the novelty it used to be. Formerly something of great value, Twitter has made real-time information commonplace. We expect it now.

I’ve noticed a large drop in the number of people clicking through to read happening alongside an increase in the number of tweets and retweets. One very large account showed me how their clicks are down from a high of near 600,000/month earlier this year to barely 250,000/month today. And we’ve seen something similar happen to clicks on @TweetSmarter tweets. Urgent Twitter status notices, for example, used to get several thousand clicks, and are down to maybe a quarter of that.

I think part of the reason for the drop is that the novelty of seeing information in real time has worn off for longer-term users. The first few times you see tweets about celebrity deaths, they seem more retweet worthy than they do after seeing them for several years in a row. What do you think?

Another factor: Overuse

The tragedy of the commons parable says that popular resources open to the public can be over- or misused. At first they work well for a few people, but as more people use the resource, its value can be driven down or destroyed. Think of a stream that can provide water to a few people a day. If too many people arrive and start jostling in the river, the water could become muddy and not good for anyone.

A similar situation with Twitter is using it to find links to articles to read vs. sharing links for others to read. When everyone follows only a few quality people and no one overshares lower-quality tweets, Twitter is an easy-to manage resource for finding quality information. Of course, just sharing more tweets and following more people doesn’t HAVE to mean the quality goes down, but that is usually what happens. The more people you follow, and the more everyone shares, the harder it is to easily find relevant, high-quality tweets. The water is muddied with thousands of tweets.

Twitter tools come to the rescue to a large degree, allowing you to filter the tweets you see, or create Twitter Lists of fewer people tweeting more focused or higher-quality tweets. And there are other ways to manage finding tweets as well. But it has made using Twitter well a more advanced task than ever before. If you’re not careful, it can be less like a intimate party with interesting people and more like a riot with thousands of people shouting.

Alternate uses of Twitter

But alongside the growth in size and volume has come a growth in ways to use Twitter. It has become valuable in more ways than ever before. The purpose and value of Twitter is changing and becoming more varied. I think the reality of what we are seeing is simply that Twitter is growing up, becoming much more than a place to try to get people to read your blog, or find interesting links to follow and read. It’s still great for those things, but we would all be wise to make the most of it, and not find ourselves stuck in the past. What’s your take?